Zoom meeting etiquette that actually matters
Video calls outlasted lockdown. In the September 2024 quarter, Stats NZ counted 898,700 people who worked from home for some or all of the week, 33.2% of employed people who worked. Most of them, 651,800, were hybrid workers who split the week between home and somewhere else.
Those calls cluster in the best hours of the day. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, drawn from Microsoft 365 usage data, found half of all meetings fall between 9am and 11am or 1pm and 3pm, when many people focus best.
Cameras and the mirror problem
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, published the first peer-reviewed paper breaking down “Zoom fatigue” in February 2021. He named four causes. Close-up eye contact is intense, watching your own face is tiring, a fixed camera stops you moving, and sending signals through a screen takes more effort.
His fixes are small. Take the call out of full screen so faces appear smaller, and use “hide self-view” once you’ve checked your framing. He told Stanford Report that seeing yourself all day is like someone following you around with a mirror, which “would just be crazy”. The same article says he recommends groups let people turn video off for stretches to get “a brief nonverbal rest”.
In the US, Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, tested cameras directly. Her team switched 103 healthcare employees between cameras on and cameras off for two weeks each, controlling for how many meetings they had, and published the results in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Cameras-on days brought more fatigue, which then cut how much people spoke up, and the effect was stronger for women and newer employees.
“We’re not advocating for cameras off all the time,” Kristen said in a University of Georgia release in September 2021, “but we are advocating for allowing people autonomy and being more strategic in the way that we do meetings with Zoom and other video platforms.”
In practice that points to cameras by choice, with no expectation that the newest person on the team keeps theirs on longest. Muting when you aren’t speaking keeps keyboard noise and the dog out of everyone else’s ears.
Recording and AI note-takers
Teams flags a recording. Microsoft’s support page says all participants get a notification as soon as one starts.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s AskUs guidance, updated in October 2025, says “it is best to voice record a meeting with consent, so that both sides have an accurate record of what occurred.” It says covert recording is harder to justify because “there is a strong presumption that it is unfair”, and that when a business makes a recording, the people on it can ask for a copy.
The Commissioner’s education-sector guidance, launched in March 2026, describes what can go wrong. A meeting participant ran an AI assistant in the background without the others knowing, and afterwards it emailed its notes to everyone invited, including people who hadn’t attended. The guidance says people should be told when an AI assistant is running and what it’s doing, so they can decide what to share and whether to turn their cameras off.
For any business, that means saying at the start that the call is being recorded or transcribed, naming the tool, and saying who gets the notes.
Time zones, start times and the email test
Microsoft’s 2025 data found 30% of meetings span more than one time zone, and meetings starting after 8pm were up 16% on the year before, driven by cross-time-zone work.
For Canterbury businesses working with Australia, the gap shifts. New Zealand daylight saving runs from 27 September 2026 to 4 April 2027, according to govt.nz. New South Wales started its daylight saving on 4 October, and Queensland doesn’t observe it, the NSW Government says. Through summer that puts Christchurch two hours ahead of Sydney and three ahead of Brisbane, so a 4pm Christchurch call lands at 1pm in Brisbane. Put both times in the invite.
Starting on the minute matters too. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index survey of 31,000 workers found 57% say it’s hard to catch up if they join a meeting late, and 55% say next steps at the end are unclear.
The same report ranked inefficient meetings as people’s number one productivity disruptor. Only 35% thought they’d be missed in most of their meetings, and the top reason people gave for a meeting being worthwhile was getting information to do their job better.
If a meeting’s only job is passing on information, with no decision to make, send it as an email. People can read it in their own time zone, and nobody has to turn a camera on.
