According to a survey, many pretend they need to install a system update to skip a meeting on Zoom, Meet, Teams or Skype. And that’s not all!
Let’s face it: smart working is great, but online meetings are not. If already unloved in-person meetings in the company, in fact, the virtualization of the meeting on Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype or other platforms is considered a nuisance by most employees. And, because of this, many of them have pulled out a trick to avoid online meetings.
More than a trick, actually, we should talk about a lie, a good and proper hoax: more and more workers skip video conferencing meetings saying they have their PC locked by a system update. Certainly Windows 10 helps them a lot to make the lie credible, since it does nothing but offer us unexpected updates (which don’t always succeed). According to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, however, it’s not just a matter of once-in-a-while lies, but a real and growing phenomenon. And, more generally, two very interesting things emerge from the company’s recent study: 16% of Italians have told the update lie at least once, and 26% of Italians said they had lost the data they were working on due to the reboot of the PC connected to the update.
Update Vs. Meeting: the survey
These data, as mentioned, come from a recent international survey conducted by Kaspersky. They reveal the new trend: refusing to attend a meeting, telling colleagues that their PC is blocked by an update. Even if it’s not true, who can confirm or deny it?
At least 16% of the Italians surveyed admitted to having told this lie at least once, and it would already be a significant figure if it weren’t accompanied by a second, even more cunning phenomenon: 22% of those surveyed admitted to having installed updates to avoid having to work.
That is, they put off the update until it was convenient for them to have their PC locked. This is a very dishonest method of dealing with the company, boss and colleagues, made possible by the way Windows handles updates.
As Egor Kharchenko, IT Service and Asset Group Manager at Kaspersky explains, “Updates are downloaded during working hours in silent mode without interrupting any activities. However, in order to apply changes to the system, it is necessary to reboot the device. Of course, some business issues cannot be delayed, so the user is given the option to reboot the device within a certain period of time.” If the user/worker is smart, then, he/she will install updates when it is most convenient for him/her.
Updates against videocall stress
Good part of that 16% and even more of that 22% of Italian respondents, at this point, could say that a “prudent management of updates” serves to reduce the so-called “videocall stress”.
A stress never seen before the boom of smart working, also renamed “Zoom Fatigue” by psychologists. But theorized as far back as 2015 Anna Johansson, an American entrepreneur and writer, was onto something when she published a post on Entrepreneur in which she called meetings “the worst ritual in business.”