When the COVID-19 pandemic confined millions to their homes, endless hours spent in front of a webcam gave rise to a new expression: “Zoom fatigue.” The phrase quickly entered everyday vocabulary and was widely reported in the media as shorthand for the exhaustion many people felt after online meetings. According to Junior Professor Hadar Nesher Shoshan of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), that perception reflected the reality of the time. “During lockdown, there is no doubt that people were drained by video calls,” she notes. “But our latest research suggests that under present conditions, this is no longer the case. In fact, video meetings today do not appear to be any more tiring than face-to-face encounters.” The team’s findings have just been published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
The study was conducted in collaboration with Assistant Professor Wilken Wehrt of Maastricht University and involved 125 participants who recorded their experiences of everyday meetings over 10 days. The researchers collected information on 945 meetings in total, with 62 per cent of these meetings taking place online. Participants were asked to note whether their meetings were virtual or in person, whether they multitasked during them, whether they had the opportunity to take a break or move around, and how exhausted they felt afterwards. This systematic approach allowed the researchers to make direct comparisons between meeting formats. “Our starting assumption was that Zoom fatigue would still be evident, since almost all previous studies had reached that conclusion,” explains Nesher Shoshan. “To our surprise, the data showed no such pattern. We found no evidence that online meetings were more fatiguing than traditional meetings. In fact, video meetings lasting under 44 minutes were reported to be less exhausting than their in-person counterparts.”
One of the central questions arising from these results is why they diverge from earlier studies. The answer, the researchers argue, lies in the timing of data collection. Almost all existing studies relied on information gathered during the height of the pandemic, when online meetings were inseparably linked with lockdown conditions, social restrictions, and a general sense of disruption. “It is much more likely that fatigue was not caused by the digital format of the meetings themselves, but by the wider context of the pandemic,” says Nesher Shoshan. “Video calls became symbols of isolation, monotony, and the loss of normal working and social life. Our findings emphasise how essential it is in the social sciences to replicate research under new circumstances, because the historical context shapes the results.”
The new evidence carries significant implications for the ongoing debates about remote work and hybrid arrangements. Concerns about burnout, loss of engagement, and diminished well-being in home-working contexts often hinge on the belief that online meetings are inherently draining. This study undercuts that assumption. As Nesher Shoshan points out, the results demonstrate that the supposed “disadvantage” of digital meetings is not a fixed truth, but rather a product of an extraordinary moment in history. “At the very least, our work challenges the claim that employees working from home are automatically more at risk of meeting-related exhaustion,” she explains. “If anything, when structured properly and kept reasonably short, online meetings can be just as sustainable as traditional ones.”
In retrospect, the term “Zoom fatigue” may have been less about technology and more about the psychological toll of an unprecedented crisis. The confinement of lockdown, the blurring of work–life boundaries, and the absence of informal social interaction all converged on the digital meeting as the visible culprit. Now, with more balance restored to working life and with people better adapted to virtual communication, the fatigue once attributed to Zoom seems to have faded.
For researchers, the lesson is twofold. First, it illustrates the importance of revisiting widely accepted claims with fresh data, rather than assuming that findings remain universally valid. Second, it demonstrates how social and psychological phenomena can be deeply intertwined with their historical context. For practitioners and organisations, the findings are equally valuable. They suggest that fears about the exhausting nature of online collaboration may be overstated in the post-pandemic workplace, clearing the way for more confident adoption of hybrid work models without the looming spectre of fatigue.
Ultimately, the research reframes the story of Zoom fatigue from a universal truth into a temporary chapter in the history of work. Far from being an inevitable feature of online interaction, fatigue appears to have been an artefact of pandemic conditions. As this new study demonstrates, digital meetings today are no more inherently draining than their face-to-face equivalents—and sometimes, they may even prove to be the more refreshing option.
More information: Hadar Nesher Shoshan et al, “Zoom fatigue” revisited: Are video meetings still exhausting post-COVID-19? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/ocp0000409
Journal information: Journal of Occupational Health Psychology Provided by Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz