Principal Investigator: Christof Weinhardt

When virtual collaboration rapidly became the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic, the term Zoom Fatigue quickly emerged to describe a new form of exhaustion associated with video meetings. An influential early theoretical argument by Bailenson (2021) identified four core mechanisms, namely close eye contact, nonverbal overload, the “all-day mirror,” and reduced mobility, which subsequently triggered a wave of research on video-mediated work.

However, reduced physical mobility has received comparatively little experimental attention, despite being central to the original theory. While many subsequent studies addressed structural and situational factors of video meetings, key questions remain open: how fatigue develops over time during video meetings, how Zoom Fatigue differs from classical mental fatigue, and how social and personal values shared within teams (shared mental models) shape social and emotional fatigue after meetings, with downstream effects on collaboration and coordination.

This project addresses these gaps through controlled laboratory as well as online studies. Initial results suggest that increased mobility through 10 minutes of sit–stand desk usage during 60 minutes of video conferencing shows behavioral recovery patterns. Even so, subjective fatigue develops comparably in video conferencing and individual high-workload multitasking; physiological data point to distinct fatigue-related dynamics, and from a psychometric viewpoint Zoom fatigue unfolds with a temporal delay. Ongoing work further examines how shared mental models within teams interact with Zoom Fatigue mechanisms and collaborative coordination, aiming to complete a process-oriented picture of fatigue in digital work.