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Office Life
© Netatmo
Useful ideas for
everyday office life.
For fresh air and clear heads: Netatmo’s
smart weather stations for office and
home!
Optimise your virtual office meetings with
Otter and GenAI.
Otter, the AI-supported meeting assistant that transcribes
audio in real-time, has been taken to the next level with
additional AI features. Using GenAI, it now provides an AI
chatbot that supplies information from previous meetings
recorded with Otter. There is also an AI chat function and
an AI meeting summary that provides an overview of what
was discussed. So you always know what’s happening, even
without the full transcript.
www.otter.ai
Slow down!
From a meeting marathon
to a gentle stroll.
Just finished another day of constant meetings?
Beware. Multiple meetings back-toback
without a break can quickly raise your
stress levels.
We’re all keenly aware that a constant barrage of
meetings doesn’t have much of a positive effect on our
general levels of concentration. Microsoft’s Human
Factors Lab recently carried out a study that measured
peoples’ brainwaves during meetings to determine
their stress levels. The researchers worked with two
different test groups. The first had to have four halfhour
video calls covering different topics on a single
day – back-to-back without a break. The second group
had the same, but with ten-minute gaps between
meetings.
Breaks: The magic bullet.
While the participants’ stress levels
rose and rose during the relentless
meetings, the brief breaks reduced
them to the extent that the subjects
felt a similar amount of motivation
for the last meeting as they did for
the first.
to a new meeting, as the person had to start thinking
about a completely different topic. And during the
meetings, the group who had no breaks were less engaged
and became increasingly withdrawn.
Adding to this stress was having to plan in particularly
challenging, focused tasks between the onslaught of
meetings, all themselves requiring a high degree of
concentration. The better solution here is to combine
simple individual tasks with complex meetings, or
brief and less demanding meetings with tasks that
require greater concentration. A research team at Yale
University also found that online meetings over Zoom
or Teams further fatigue the brain due to the lack of
natural and dynamic interaction between participants,
and feeds dropping in and out and buffering requiring
greater concentration.
So what can you do to stem the negative impacts of
an uninterrupted meeting marathon? If possible, the
recommendation is to not plan in too many meetings
on the same day, and not to rely solely on virtual
meetings. But as this is often impossible to control
or avoid, you need to plan wisely and – above all –
ensure there are breaks. And what’s the best way to
use these breaks? The most important thing is to get
some distance from your desk and work. It also makes
sense to do something that distracts and relaxes you.
Meditating, taking a short walk, small talk,
stretching exercises and getting a bit
of fresh air are just a few examples
of ways we can give our brains a
much-deserved rest.
Source: Research proves your brain needs breaks; Microsoft Human Factors Lab, 2021
Say goodbye to fatigued brains! With the Netatmo
weather station, you’ll always have a clear view of the
air quality and room temperature in your office. It
measures data in real-time and presents it clearly in
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work in. The smart weather station helps you find the
perfect time to ventilate the space and keep the office
at maximum productivity!
www.netatmo.com
© Otter
The highest level of stress was recorded
shortly before the transition
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