When COVID-19 led to mandatory working from home, significant blind spots in supporting the sociality of working life—in the moment and over time—were revealed in enterprise video meetings, and these were a key factor in reports about videoconferencing fatigue. Drawing on a large study (N = 849) of one global technology company’s employees’ experiences of all-remote video meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, we use a dialectic method to explore the tensions expressed by employees around effectiveness and sociality, as well as their strategies to cope with these tensions. We argue that videoconferencing fatigue arose partly due to work practices and technologies designed with assumptions of steady states and taken-for-granted balances between task and social dimensions of work relationships. Our analysis offers a social lens on videoconferencing fatigue and suggests the need to reconceptualize ideas around designing technologies and practices to enable both effectiveness and sociality in the context of video meetings.

当 COVID-19 导致强制在家工作时，企业视频会议在当前和一段时间内在支持工作生活社交性方面存在重大盲点，而这些盲点是有关视频会议疲劳的报告中的一个关键因素。基于对一家全球科技公司员工在 COVID-19 大流行期间参加全远程视频会议的经历进行的一项大型研究 ( N  = 849)，我们使用辩证法来探讨员工在有效性和社交性方面所表达的紧张情绪作为他们应对这些紧张局势的策略。我们认为，视频会议疲劳的产生部分是由于工作实践和技术是根据稳态假设以及工作关系的任务和社会维度之间理所当然的平衡而设计的。我们的分析提供了关于视频会议疲劳的社交视角，并建议需要重新概念化有关设计技术和实践的想法，以在视频会议的背景下实现有效性和社交性。