Slashdot: Employers Are Trying 'Quiet Days' To Dial Back the Time Remote Workers Spend on Meetings

Employers Are Trying ‘Quiet Days’ To Dial Back the Time Remote Workers Spend on Meetings
Published on September 30, 2020 at 01:33PM
Some employers are giving their Zoomed-out workers a break. From a report: From tech startups to sprawling hospitals, businesses say they are trying to dial back time employees spend in remote meetings after realizing that hours spent on video calls every day have taken a toll. Still, some employees have a hard time breaking the Zoom habit, even with their bosses telling them to stop. Executives making the switch say meeting schedules ballooned in the pandemic’s early days, largely due to the perceived ease of video calls and a desire to maintain workday normalcy as much of the country sheltered in place. “Zoom fatigue is real,” said Abby Payne, chief people officer at SailPoint Technologies. The Austin, Texas, company has instituted a ban on meetings from 10 a.m. to noon every Tuesday and Thursday. Employee comments about sitting down at their computers at 7 a.m. and not getting up for 12 hours helped prompt the move, Ms. Payne said. “This is really a way for the organization as a whole to address both the fatigue of staring into a computer and also the reality that half of us have little ones,” she added. The 1,000-person company enacted the restriction on meetings in August when it realized many employees would be juggling work while also raising children who would be attending school remotely in the fall.