Have the efficiencies that video calls deliver brought new risks of burnout?

I’ve been giving some thought lately as to why a lot of the people I interact with have seemed increasingly frantic and stressed over the last year. Speaking for myself, up until last week I’ve been struggling too; feeling tired, drained, sometimes even negative about a job I love and, above all, feeling somewhat ineffective no matter how hard I work or how many hours I put in.

I like to put 110% into things I do, and for the first time ever, that was really tough. No doubt a national pandemic that’s made it hard to see family or friends for over a year has something to do with my mental state, but I’m pretty sure there’s a bit more to it. In particular, I can’t help thinking that the incredibly sudden shift we’ve seen as an agency in how we engage with clients and with colleagues has a lot to do with it, and more than anything that’s down to the sudden growth in video calls as our main means of communication.

As email became more and more widely used in business in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it must have initially seemed like a revolution in efficiency. The long gaps in communication caused by waiting for letters and memos to be delivered were completely removed, a communication could be sent to an entire company at the press of a button, and a quick one-line email could replace a carefully-drafted memo or a phone call. A few decades later, and we’re starting to acknowledge the toll that all this ‘efficiency’ has in fact taken on us in our working lives and mental health.

This move to video calling may have been caused by the pandemic but now it’s here, it’s here to stay, and I’m starting to think that it’s something we’ll look back on as being equally as disruptive to our professional lives as the shift to email. If so, maybe now is the time to start thinking about how we can embrace the efficiency while also mitigating the damage.

You see, before lockdown, we held the majority of client meetings in person - many of our clients would insist on that and, even when they didn’t, we often did. The logistics involved in organising an in-person meeting meant that it would be rare that I’d have more than a few big client-facing meetings a week. Follow-up meetings would likewise have to be scheduled a week or so ahead, giving us time to complete work and prepare to present back. And of course we’d often be travelling to get to client premises, giving us a couple of hours out of our day both before and after the meeting to prepare beforehand, write up notes afterwards, chat to other colleagues attending the meeting, and generally focus on the task at hand. Sometimes it was just a good opportunity to unwind and subconsciously declutter my brain.

Contrast that to how we’ve worked for the last year, and we’ve got used to being able to set up video calls with clients at almost a moment’s notice. We’re talking to some clients far more regularly than we used to and in many ways that’s been brilliant for collaboration, speed of making decisions and building relationships with our clients. However, I and many of my client-facing colleagues have ended up with an almost unmanageable combination of: more time talking to clients about work, fewer free slots to do work, quicker follow-ups, and shorter time-frames in which to turn tasks around.

On top of this, the supportive, collaborative atmosphere of an agency where most people were in the office most of the time has been replaced by everyone working in their own siloes with far fewer opportunities for informal interactions with colleagues. And all this happened almost literally overnight with very little time to adjust, develop new ways of working, or consider the consequences.

This feels like exactly the toxic combination of factors that leads to burnout, and I recently read a great article in The New Happy which made so much sense of how I’ve been feeling. The author identified exactly the symptoms I’d experienced (exhaustion, cynicism and negativity, a sense of ineffectiveness) and pinned the cause down to precisely the issues I’ve described above - ‘prolonged exposure to chronic demands and stressors’.

Identifying the problem is only half the battle, though - what can we do to prevent burnout and avoid making the switch to video calls something that permanently and irreparably damages our professional lives and mental well being?

First of all, as the article linked above identifies, it’s important to decrease the demands on you. In the context of video calls, maybe that means carving out the same ‘thinking time’ before and after a call that you used to have when the meeting was done in-person. Maybe it means getting comfortable with declining meetings if they won’t give you enough time to prepare, blocking out space in your calendar when you won’t be available for calls, or even setting aside an entire day for no meetings.

For managers and leaders, it means seeing it as a key part of our job to manage the demands on our team and recognise the enormous ways those demands have changed in the last 12 months. We have to ensure their workload is reasonable, not just when averaged across a year, but when viewed as individual days or weeks of high pressure, back-to-back calls, and tight deadlines. We have to make sure they feel supported in pushing back on unmanageable demands, and able to speak to us openly about changes they need to keep them effective. And, above all, we have to be open to and open about the reality and risk of burnout, treating it as a risk to be mitigated in the workplace just as we would mitigate any other risk to the health and wellbeing of our employees.

There’s no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic will be looked back on as causing some of the most significant and rapid changes to our working lives since WW2. Many of those changes will be for the better, and we should be excited for the greater flexibility, collaboration and communication brought by hybrid working and a decreasing reliance on being in the office and having meetings in person. However, as with email, once expectations for speed, responsiveness and availability change it can be very hard to go back, so now is the time to set those expectations in a way that works for us and for our mental health.

Above all, the best step we can all take in improving our mental health is identifying what are the things in our lives that have a negative or positive impact on it. Pinning down the specific problems I’ve discussed here has made it so much easier for me to find ways to deal with them and to rebuild my energy, drive and enthusiasm. I’m especially grateful to my coach, Bruce, and to colleagues and clients at 7DOTS for all their support.

My thanks as well to Jake Bate for helping me shape my thoughts on this topic into a readable article.