Meeting needs: How social interaction anxiety, zoom fatigue, relatedness, and demographics predict virtual meeting feature preferences

Virtual Meetings (VMs) have become a prevalent form of workplace communication since the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their many advantages, workers face challenges due to the technological limitations of contemporary platforms. This study investigated workers' preferences for VM features and their associations with social and psychological factors intertwined with workplace dynamics. Through a survey of workers who regularly use VM platforms (N = 2,448), we categorized feature preferences into eight groups based on common underlying mechanisms. We then identified features related to social interaction anxiety (SIA), VM fatigue, and basic psychological need satisfaction, drawing on Self-Determination Theory and uses and gratification theory, and examined how these factors are associated with preferences for VM features by gender, race, and tenure. Notably, SIA, VM fatigue, and relatedness with colleagues emerged as key predictors of feature use and preferences. Features supporting impression management, accessibility, and video muting were linked to SIA and VM fatigue across the overall sample. Among all predictors, SIA was the strongest predictor of accessibility, collaborative, playful, and video management feature usage—especially for women, people of color, and less experienced workers. In terms of VM fatigue, impression management feature use was particularly salient for women and people of color experiencing high fatigue, while less experienced workers with high fatigue were more likely to use video management features. Perceived relatedness was positively related to the use of accessibility features and the preference for collaborative and playful features across the entire sample. This study contributes to our understanding of how to design VM features that support workers’ well-being, with a focus on those more vulnerable to ambiguous social situations in professional environments.