By September 2020, everyone had noticed it. Your colleagues’ cameras stayed off more often. Meetings that could have been emails started being scheduled as async updates. People began admitting they were exhausted just from looking at screens full of faces, and they weren’t being dramatic.

Zoom fatigue had become real enough that scientists were studying it, companies were making policy changes around it, and HR teams were fielding complaints about it daily. But there’s a group of people who experienced this exhaustion in a uniquely brutal way: IT professionals. If you work in IT, you weren’t just suffering from the same video conferencing burnout as everyone else. You were also the person tasked with fixing everyone else’s Zoom problems while attending your own never-ending stream of troubleshooting calls.

What Happened in 2020

The numbers tell a stark story of how suddenly this all materialized. Zoom had 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019. By April 2020, that number had climbed to 300 million. That’s not gradual growth. That’s a forced, overnight migration of nearly the entire working world into video conferencing as the primary tool for collaboration.

Microsoft Teams, the other major player, saw similar velocity, hitting 75 million daily active users by April 2020. Companies that had been casually experimenting with remote work were now dependent on video conferencing as their entire operational backbone. And they were doing this without the infrastructure, policies, or emotional bandwidth to manage it well.

What nobody anticipated was the cost, not just in bandwidth or server load, but in human attention and energy.

The Science Behind the Exhaustion

Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, led by Jeremy Bailenson, began documenting why video conferencing was so uniquely draining compared to in-person or phone-based communication. They identified several mechanisms at work, and understanding them helps explain why this wasn’t just complaining.

The first is excessive close-up eye contact. In a video meeting, faces fill your screen in a way that mimics intense, prolonged eye contact with multiple people simultaneously. Your brain interprets this as highly engaging and somewhat confrontational, which triggers a sustained activation response. Unlike in-person meetings where people naturally look away, glance at notes, or shift their gaze around the room, video meetings lock your eyes on faces in an unnatural way.

The second is cognitive overload from interpreting nonverbal cues. On a screen, you lose the peripheral awareness and body language context that you process effortlessly in person. Instead, you’re hyper-focused on reading micro-expressions and trying to interpret subtle signals from flat, two-dimensional video feeds. This constant, deliberate work of processing communication is exhausting in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

The third factor is the self-view window. For most of 2020, the default experience in video conferencing was watching yourself while talking. This constant self-monitoring creates a feedback loop where you’re simultaneously speaking, listening, and mentally critiquing your own appearance and demeanor. It’s the video equivalent of hearing your own voice magnified while you’re talking.

Finally, there’s reduced physical mobility. You’re locked to a chair, on camera, for hours at a time. In a physical office, you’d move between meetings, walk to grab coffee, stretch in ways that feel natural. Video meetings trap you in a seated, static posture for the entire duration.

These factors don’t just make meetings tiring. They make them neurologically demanding in a way that most people couldn’t sustain without feeling genuinely burned out.

The Burnout Data

By July 2020, researchers were starting to quantify the impact. Surveys showed that 69% of work-from-home employees reported burnout symptoms, up from 51% in May. That’s not a gradual increase. That’s a third of your workforce moving from “managing okay” to “showing signs of burnout” in just two months.

When researchers asked specifically about video conferencing fatigue, 49% of professionals reported experiencing what they called “Zoom fatigue” or video meeting exhaustion. Nearly half. And this was happening to people in their homes, often with inadequate equipment, unreliable internet, and no separation between their work life and personal life.

You’d think IT teams, with their technical knowledge and presumably better infrastructure, would be insulated from this. You’d be wrong.

The Double Burden on IT Teams

Here’s the unique position IT professionals found themselves in by mid-2020: they weren’t just attending their own meetings and dealing with the exhaustion everyone else felt. They were simultaneously the infrastructure that made video conferencing possible, and therefore the infrastructure that people relied on when it failed.

An IT team member might spend their morning in back-to-back standup meetings, one-on-ones, and planning sessions, suffering through the same screen fatigue as anyone else. Then in the afternoon, they’d be handling support tickets for users whose cameras wouldn’t turn on, whose audio was cutting out, whose bandwidth was throttled, or whose VPN connection wasn’t stable enough for reliable video. They’d be troubleshooting Zoom room setups for conference calls, debugging Teams integration issues, and dealing with a tidal wave of connectivity problems that never existed when people were in offices.

This wasn’t a secondary support task. In many organizations, video conferencing support became the primary reactive workload for IT teams between March and September 2020. Users who would normally be patient with IT issues suddenly needed urgent help because their Zoom call for a client meeting was starting in three minutes.

The exhaustion wasn’t just about Zoom fatigue. It was about being the person responsible for everyone else’s Zoom experience while also drowning in your own meeting load.

How Organizations Responded

Some companies started paying attention to the problem. Forward-thinking leaders began implementing policies that actually acknowledged the problem instead of pretending remote work was seamless.

Companies started establishing “no meeting” days, typically Wednesdays or Fridays, where video calls were discouraged unless absolutely necessary. Others made cameras optional, giving people permission to participate in meetings without video. Some organizations experimented with meeting length limits, restricting calls to 30 or 45 minutes instead of the default hour-long calendar slots.

More importantly, asynchronous communication tools started becoming genuinely valued. Loom, the video recording tool, saw massive adoption as companies realized that recorded updates could replace live meetings. Slack threads became a way to have conversations without requiring everyone to be online at the same time. Some teams adopted writing-first cultures where decisions got documented and discussed in writing rather than hashed out verbally in real-time.

The underlying theme in all of this was permission. Permission to not be on video. Permission to not attend every meeting. Permission to communicate asynchronously. For many workers, that permission was the most important thing they got from their employer in 2020.

The Emerging Career Opportunity

Interestingly, while individual IT professionals were burning out from supporting video conferencing, the broader market for video conferencing expertise was exploding.

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) roles grew throughout 2020. Revenue for UC&C solutions grew 25.1% year-over-year in Q2 2020 alone, reaching $11.5 billion. Companies were investing heavily in better video conferencing infrastructure, better integration between tools, and better security around these new communication channels.

This created genuine career opportunities for IT professionals with UC&C expertise. Specialists who understood how to architect robust video conferencing systems, integrate them with existing infrastructure, and support them at scale became increasingly valuable. The “digital workplace” as a concept started emerging as a legitimate specialization.

If you were an IT professional in 2020 feeling burned out from supporting Zoom, you should know that the skills you were developing in real-time were becoming marketable specializations. The expertise you gained from troubleshooting video conferencing problems at scale was the same expertise companies needed to hire for.

What This Meant for IT Culture

What happened to IT teams in 2020 wasn’t unique to IT, but it was more acute. Every knowledge worker was dealing with Zoom fatigue and meeting overload. But IT teams were dealing with that plus the burden of making it all work for everyone else.

This is similar to what happened to helpdesk workers more broadly. As we’ve discussed before, the July 2020 period was when IT support teams experienced an unprecedented surge in workload. The sudden shift to remote work created a perfect storm where every user had technical problems and every IT person was stretched impossibly thin.

The burnout wasn’t a sign of weakness or inability to cope. The data was clear: your team wasn’t lazy, they were burned out. IT teams were experiencing legitimate neurological exhaustion combined with unsustainable workload increases, and the professional response to that isn’t to push through. It’s to acknowledge it and make structural changes.

What Happened Next

By September 2020, most organizations had adapted somewhat. The initial chaos of the spring months had settled into a new normal. People developed better routines. They invested in better equipment. They set boundaries around meetings. Companies that cared about retention started implementing the policies I mentioned, creating space for their teams to actually recover.

But the experience left marks. People learned which parts of video conferencing they actually needed and which parts they’d tolerated out of default practice. They discovered that they didn’t need cameras on for every meeting. They found that async updates were sometimes better than live discussions. They realized that more meetings didn’t equal more collaboration.

For IT teams specifically, 2020 validated something important: the infrastructure that enables modern work isn’t something you can ignore, and the people who manage it deserve recognition for the work they do. Your IT team wasn’t just keeping the lights on in 2020. They were fundamentally enabling your entire organization’s ability to function.

If you work in IT and you felt exhausted in 2020, it wasn’t in your head. The science backs it up. The data backs it up. And the unique burden you carried, on top of everyone else’s burden, was real.

The path forward wasn’t returning to the office. For most organizations, it was building a better remote work infrastructure, setting saner policies around video conferencing, and treating the people who keep things running like they actually matter.