The digital workplace and meeting accessibility: A qualitative study on listening effort in video meetings for employees with hearing loss.
Erik Marsja, Carine Signoret, Victoria Stenbäck
Employees with hearing loss said video meetings gave them clearer audio and structured turn-taking, but also left them mentally drained and struggling to remember what was said.
Large groups and hybrid formats were the hardest. They coped by controlling volume and spacing meetings.
Key findings
1Participants described both benefits (clearer audio, structured turn-taking, no travel) and costs (mental fatigue, difficulty in large or hybrid meetings) of video meetings, with the experience depending heavily on meeting conditions.
2Hybrid meetings, where some participants were in a room and others joined digitally, were the hardest to follow, with in-room side conversations and poor turn-taking making it difficult for the remote participant.
3Participants managed listening effort by controlling their own volume, spacing meetings to avoid back-to-back sessions, and asking colleagues to use headsets with microphones.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Fourteen participants, all Swedish, all native Swedish speakers, recruited through a single mailing list and clinic posters, so the sample is narrow and self-selected. Self-selection may have attracted more motivated or tech-literate participants, limiting the range of perspectives. Data came only from interviews; no observation of actual meetings or objective measures of listening effort. The study focused on video meetings specifically and did not cover other digital tools like threaded messaging or real-time chat. All participants were in paid employment, so the findings may not apply to students, unemployed individuals, or those in very different work settings.
Declared interests
Funded by the Hearing Research Foundation of the Swedish Association of the Hard of Hearing (grant FA21-0012). The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The funder is a patient advocacy organization, not a commercial entity.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that video meetings are worse for hearing loss than in-person meetings. Participants described both clearer audio and greater fatigue, and the experience depended heavily on meeting size, format, and audio quality. A small, well-run video meeting was often easier to follow than a noisy in-person one.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →