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You can achieve more with your emotional skills
Emotional skills
Recognizing, interpreting and predicting emotions is a skill that we learn from an early age and apply every day. Our eyes play a crucial role in this because they register the facial expressions of the people we meet in real time.
Being able to express our own emotions and attuning them to the social context is just as important. This helps us influence the behavior and perceptions of others. Our eyes also play a crucial role here.
We show our emotions with the direction of our gaze, such as when, how, and how long we look into the eyes of other people. They in turn interpret the visual signals sent by our eyes in terms of our state of mind, our intentions and needs, and then respond to them.
The communication skills of our eyes play an important role in the workplace. They help us to persuade, to collaborate, and much more.
Healthcare providers & psychologists show empathy with their eyes during conversations with their patients and clients, thus creating trust and reducing fear; this helps to improve treatment outcomes and therapeutic outcomes.
Customer care & sales professionals create customer satisfaction and loyalty by using their emotional skills. They use their eyes to build trust and to detect purchasing intentions.
Employees with an office job create more trust, experience more progress and receive more help in their interactions with colleagues when they are highly skilled at using their emotions.
Teachers support their students by sending signals of encouragement with their eyes in order to help them achieve their learning goals.
Eye contact is therefore a crucial tool for many professionals in using their emotional skills. If eye contact is not possible, detecting and showing emotions becomes much more difficult. We are then inclined to use compensatory behavior, such as sending emojis in a chat and explanations in an email afterwards.
“The widespread adoption of video-conferencing has increased feelings
of Zoom fatigue among workers around the world.”
Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University, 2023
Emotional efforts & video fatigue
The emotions we show as professionals in a conversation to achieve our goals are often very different from what we would show on our own.
Psychologists use the term emotional labor to describe the process of controlling our feelings and our emotional expressions to meet the demands of our job. Most jobs involve emotional labor due to norms that dictate which emotions should be suppressed or shown and when.
Video calling brings yet another source of emotional effort. The signals that we are used to see and show with our eyes in physical meetings are simply not present in our calls. This is very confusing and tiring, especially when the stakes are high and we feel a great need to use our emotional skills.
Young employees who work remotely often have a particularly hard time. They have a strong need to receive eye signals from colleagues and managers that communicate disapproval, approval, and encouragement. This feedback is missing with remote collaboration. This may help explain why, according to the Dutch National Working Conditions Survey 2022, many young employees suffer from burnout symptoms.
It is therefore not surprising that you often feel exhausted at the end of a day filled with video calls. This is not something you imagine. Lack of eye contact causes video fatigue, as confirmed in a study by Stanford researchers.
“Shared eye contact allows us to create our relationship together; with eye contact we adapt to each other, so we feel more connected and less intimidated.”
Benefits of calling with eyeQ
If you use eyeQ instead of your laptop camera or webcam, video calls will become more like face-to-face conversations. This has many advantages.
1. You activate each other’s emotional skills.
You can now look at the eyes on your computer screen and simultaneously deliver eye contact to your video contact. This allows you to activate each other’s emotional skills.
2. You build deeper bonds & become more likeable
By showing natural eye contact, you create deeper bonds with your video contacts, enhancing their trust in you.
Academic research has shown that you also come across as more sympathetic.
3. You promote the quality of communication & collaboration.
Deeper connections make your conversations much smoother. Collaboration with team members working at other locations becomes more effective.
4. You reduce the mental burden of both of you.
It becomes less tiring to conduct video calls that meet the requirements of your position, reducing video fatigue for yourself and for your contacts.
With eyeQ you can achieve more, and you reduce video fatigue.
The benefits are even greater when your contact also uses eyeQ and you both experience eye contact at the same time.
Want to know more? Get in contact with us or visit the home page to find more information.
