I really dislike the idea that people should be required to have their cameras on for all meetings. I think for people who rarely see one another in person, it can be good to try to encourage people to be on video occasionally, but when and how often should really be left up to the individual.
As a manager, I make it a point to try to turn my own video on most of the time, but I'd never ask someone to turn their camera on in any particular call. I want people to be able to do their best work. Building a solid team culture means you should see one another from time to time, but it doesn't have to be every call, or even most calls, and there are a lot of people who struggle from time to time to do their best work on camera.
Sometimes people are in a messy room or feel self conscious about their appearance. Sometimes people are just distracted staring at their own image on a call. Some people have to share their workspace with a partner or roommate who might be distracting in the background. Sometimes people are running something compute intensive in the background while taking a call and their computer gets too bogged down trying to encode video while also running whatever more important task it should be doing. Whatever the reason, I want people focusing on the work they are trying to do and if having their camera off lets them focus better, I'm going to encourage them to do that.
I must admit I’m one of those always-on people and everyone in our team does so. For those speaking I feel it is quite rude to not give them any visual cue on how they are doing: I’m I understood? Are my points appreciated? Do I bore people? Are people even listening?
Personally, I think the only good reasons to turn off a camera are either technical issues or if you indeed briefly want to send the message “I am distracted for a short while, but will be back with full focus in a while”
To your other points:
- Don’t like your own image: turn self-view off
- Messy background: enable blurring (or an alternative background)
People also have ticks. Some drool when concentrating, some stare in a strange way. The cam on your laptop is shoved right in your face which is different from a normal larger f2f meeting. Also people don’t secretly take pictures of you in real meetings.
I always turn the cam off when I share my screen. I want people to focus on the content I’m sharing, not the pimples in my face.
There's nothing rude about non-video calls. They are frequently carried out between heads of state or royalty, that is at the highest level of politeness.
If people are disinterested, you might want to invite less people to your meeting or use email.
At my company, all the ICs I respect have camera off meetings. Only managers, obnoxious ladder climbers, and outside consultants are constantly pushing face time.
In a general sense yes agreed, but there's a genuine value to seeing peers in meetings that I didn't appreciate until I did more stuff that was in essence presenting stuff for feedback.
For individuals choosing camera on vs. off when participating in meetings, whatever the choice, I bargain more than would admit are making some form of status calculation.
Personally I bias towards on often as it feels more... friendly?
I'm not sure how common this experience is, but my company seems to have spontaneously settled into a great habit - cameras on (some with digital backgrounds) for the "hey how you going, how was your weekend?" niceties at the start, then cameras off when we get into the meat of it.
This feels like a thoughtful way to balance "Zoom fatigue" (which is very real) with the (also very real) need for human connection and interpersonal relationship building
I find the mental overhead of the always-on camera exhausting, and I prefer voice only communication for certain types of conversations so I can dedicate all my processing power to what's being said. I also pace when I'm thinking, make coffee, lay down, etc.
In a pleasant twist of fate, migrating our full company (20ish people) into gather.town has largely made it a moot point for me now.
I have the choice between zoom like video boxes or switching to small thumbnails I largely ignore in favor of viewing/interacting with the 2D scene.
Also, when you see someone walking by and they "drop in" for a quick chat, the context for the visual feed seems more natural and less encumbering than spinning up a zoom meeting: they approach, you talk, they walk away, and you're alone again. If I pace IRL during the discussion and am off camera, my avatar is reinforcing that I'm still in the same space with the other participants.
If I don't want to be interrupted I go to a blocked off private area; the 2D equivalent of a DnD status.
(Wish I didn't have to add this disclaimer but this is the internet: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with gather in any way. That friends was just an earnest anecdote and soft reccomendation)
That's really interesting. I have used gather.town for conferences before and it works really well - but I haven't seen it used on an ongoing basis. It does make sense in a lot of ways to incorporate some of those physical cues of an office environment into a WFH setting.
It's strange but really cool to zoom out and see various meetings between people in different rooms, or when we bring an outside contact into our space for a meeting you can introduce them to coworkers ad-hoc (like a real office).
Swinging by with a guest, like other real world experiences translated into a 2D world, require developing a new set of social norms. For instance, if you're screen sharing through their app, you won't see someone approaching and the screen share feed will show up expanded by default for whomever enters. That can be problematic for a number of reasons (client data, personal info you were sharing with a close coworker, etc.).
We also have recreated games like tag using the confetti feature, have rituals like hitting a lap around the entire space on go karts after code reviews, and occasionally raid Client Experience's office for supplies.
It is a jealous god when it comes to CPU though and since modern JS environments are greedy as well, my fan gets a lot of work.
I was this way. Then I realized it’s a work culture thing. Is the team culture accepting of each other the way they look and the surroundings they are in? I’ve been part of 2 teams since the start of the pandemic and I’ve experienced both sides.
1- where my manager would visibly get annoyed at the slightest auditory or visual disturbance. He wouldn’t say anything but it was clear he was displeased to see kids in the background.
2- we all accepted each other (except this one person who didn’t understand that people with kids have different issues to deal with). My kids would barge in through the door and my team mates would wave to them, smile and continue our conversation. We’d all joke about how our shower times are all messed up so we don’t look “presentable” and yet we’d turn on our cameras because we liked seeing each other.
My current perspective is that the team culture has a big bearing of comfort level on videos.
Sample set of 1, but my (large) company has been something like 20% work-from-home long before Covid threw a turd in the punchbowl. We're still something like 50% WFH. It seems like the sales and other customer facing teams do more live video in their con-calls (I'm asked to sit in occasionally), but in most of IT maybe 1 in 20 people have their camera on during meetings, and in my area virtually noone has it on. Hasn't impacted our ability to get things done at all.
I agree with you in general, with one difference: there are specific topics in a 1:1 meeting that I’ll ask to have video on or be willing to reschedule.
I’ve done this with people who report to me, with peers, and with people higher in the org chart.
Humans communicate via audio. Actually seeing a person's face doesn't seem to add much to comprehension in my opinion. As an absurd example to illustrate this point, consider a cameras on, mics off meeting to get a sense of what proportion of information is communicated by audio vs video. As a second example, consider a meeting with cameras and audio but with a 1 second delay in audio - this would almost be as bad as the first.
I don't mind having cameras on at all really but they don't add much - it is largely just a novelty. Audio is everything.
I thought this was true most of my life...until someone suggested to me that I had Asperger's.
Upon deeper investigation, I found out (to my great surprise) that most people's experience of communication is different from mine in a profound way. They really are taking most of their cues about meaning from things other than my actual words, and they were trying to communicate a great many things to me without words that I was missing completely.
I (obviously) don't know you from anyone, but if this claim has seemed as transparently false to you as it did to me, I'd just encourage you to try to keep your mind open to the possibility that your experience is anomalous.
The good news is that once I knew this was true, I was able to focus on trying to learn to compensate. It's almost like people are speaking two languages at once, whatever they're saying out loud, and then another whole set of things in a kind of full body sign language that most of them picked up intuitively from earliest childhood and use constantly without even being aware they're doing it.
All languages are learnable if you're determined, so once you know to look for them, you can start.
If you want to come at it from a formal angle (which might be necessary), check out the old TV show "Lie to Me." It touches on the science of interpreting body expressions and facial cues. I think it'll help you see some of what I mean.
If you feel your meetings don’t benefit from non-verbal cues, consider if you really need these meetings? Maybe it’s just a status call that could have also been solved via an online status tracker?
The idea that we are communicating largely via body language and facial expressions is so absurd I had to look it up.
The person who this is attributed to is Albert Mehrabian. According to wikipedia it is more related to the "liking" of the person who puts forth the same message delivered with various vocal tones with photographs of various facial expressions, etc.
Pointless to squabble over the idea that there is some fixed 'proportion' so let me offer this -
Body langugage and facial expressions are entire, distinct channels that primarily communicate information around emotion and attitude towards objects of attention. How relevant this information in any given situation is one question.
The impact of those channels not being there, and the ability (let alone willingness) of senders and receivers (read: people in an interaction) to send and interpret that information over another channel is a whole other matter.
Sorry for the rude tone, but is useful to get to the point: non-verbal communication works they well in person, we understand others from it. With a webcam it's just a visual overload that distract and disturb.
We have gone through the very same error for the entire IT history: after the Xerox era all tried to mimic the real life in a virtual one, like many GNU/Linux newcomers try to mimic Windows paradigm and some criminals with a keyboard improperly named developers sometimes even try that path. All such moves were big failure. The virtual world have it's rules, not the same of the physical one. We do NEVER try to mimic one in the other but to elicit the maximum profit from any tools.
Working distributed is not "a way to be together but with physical distance", oh we see many consider that, we see even infra designed for that with crappy VDIs hosted somewhere to have "the virtual managed office" around the world, even some in the metaverse to try mimicking real life conferences rooms. See in the past General Magick UIs and you'll understand why that can't work.
WFH is not work in a virtual office, we need a paradigm for it, witch is totally different than the in-person one.
So, just because it’s not perfect we don’t do it at all? Agree to the paradigm shift, but so far it hasn’t emerged [1] and telling people that it will never be a replacement for physical presence, would actually quite support the crowd asking for a 100% return to office fearing that innovation and team cohesion will suffer
[1] At least nothing that we didn’t have so far. And nothing of what we have so far seems to have had any real breakthrough (actually, with the exception of video calls ;)
> So, just because it’s not perfect we don’t do it at all?
Just because is so far from perfection to a point of being just waste of bandwidth resources, a security risk [1] and an annoyance who force people a certain dress code, others with shows of decorated background and animations, others shows misery of their homes while some show their wealth status as a way to impress etc.
> telling people that it will never be a replacement for physical presence, would actually quite support the crowd asking for a 100% return to office fearing that innovation and team cohesion will suffer
Honestly, without much data but hearing climate in my circles and reading the press, those who want back in office are just middle managers and some old people who will retire in few years. So the crowd will be a very small one against a far bigger one who just say, as happen right now in various part of the world "if you want me back in the office I resign, go look for someone else"... You can't made soft paradigm changes, you can only change softly witch means for instance start pushing 99% remote work just to a series of jobs where people have enough money, interests and willingness to live cities and going full remote instead of pushing it worldwide "for the pandemic" and for all possibly remote jobs. For instance instead of pushing crappy proprietary platforms like Meet, Teams, Zoom developing a company infra on company iron, negotiating seriously with workers: "if you want full remote you need to offer us a spare room in your house at a given little monthly fee, like the same you get in office to eat, with possible sufficient connectivity to work, electricity and a closed door. We gives you all the needed furniture and gears, we pay the connection or we negotiate a compensation for them if you provide them and what you offer meet our demand" instead of giving craptops and craphones etc. When a first batch of humans, skilled, educated and wealthy enough to test the new model will finally arrive to a good stability than offering a similar paths to other workers also a bit at a time to make the migration possible, the softer possible, with enough experience already made to avoid making full-society-scale or full-company-scale disasters. You can't switch paradigm in small steps though, hybrid work does not work, mixed work in the same workforce does not work. It's a classic error common in countless situations, from the military where a general want a strategy another an almost totally different one and the chief finally choose a middle ground between the two making both a failure to the classic IT horror stories and anything in between.
Consider a thing: there is no success without risk, you can mitigate the risk reducing the risk surface, like "hey we build masonry houses only, we want to try new materials like wood, so instead of change all houses a big risk surface, we build just some few houses to see how they work" but you can't get anything from "we start with a wood based floor and one masonry".
[1] you know deepfakes need much data to be trained, the more you face/body is shown on-line the more data some model get to produce a realistic video of you stating terrorist intention or perhaps confessing a love betrayal etc realistic enough to be believed. In real life no one can hold good cam and grab data without you noticing, with modern platforms like Zoom, Teams, Meet, their owners harvest gazillions of data, and deepfakes aside what you think about holding a talk in a public place discussing works stuff? You normally want a private room, isn't it?
Quite like this argument - ie it brings up some new points for me that I haven’t considered yet.
To just provide a counterpoint to your anecdote (obviously, also nothing but another anecdote): of our team of 30 almost all came back to the office several days a week (despite it being fully optional and also management choosing various models). I think it is very much driven by the fact that the team just had a really enjoyable team spirit prior to WFH plus it is a pretty diverse team (esp. age and gender wise) which also brings up a wide variety of reasons for people opting for / against WFH
Some teams surely are also much like an extended family, no doubt, even if I like WFH now (and not just from now) at uni time I've always preferred spend time at the uni just for the social aspects I found there, but how many teams are like that, small and harmoniums enough? IME not near-zero surely, but still not that much in percentage (opinion of course, I have no real data, just too-small scale observation and casual interpolation on that).
Another point is made the environment aside: in a small/medium and spread city, with various amenities, people might like live there not just because it's near the office and once there it's a pleasure going outside. However for instance in my old big & dense city going outside was and still is definitively not a pleasure, too much traffic, pollution, noise, only the social aspect of having a big choice of people to be together instead of just accept some neighbors because there is no much choice in place is actually a pleasure, here now however I have nature around, with countless of activities, no traffic etc, so much of the issue of the city are not worth just the better social/service part. Surely, I'm not that rural, and cities are still just half an hour around...
There are many things shaping life so shaping work preferences though for what I've read here and there (different posts from different sources around the world) and my personal experience much more prefer WFH, at least those who have a voice, who know how to spread their feelings and ideas, witch left me a bit uncertain about how many prefer the office vs how many prefer living in a spread and vast Riviera, WFH... No doubt however about the abundance of advantages vs disadvantages in the short and potentially, with a bit of incertitude, in the mean/long run.
The dream of a less dense society where moving by flying cars is normal as now moving with actual road cars, so a society where a vast riviera is also a dense city since anything is few minutes of fly away is the dream. Potentially can be real in tech terms, but I do not know if / when it will ever be in reality, nor I know how many time, issues etc we will see before having experimented WFH enough to have a new paradigm working and tested enough to made general comparisons.
Faces are helpful for communicating around emotionally nuanced issues, which is usually not part of routine communications. So if it's a potentially emotionally charged conversation, maybe that should be the signal it's time to require cameras on.
High definition audio is great. That said, upwards of 90% of human communication is non-verbal, including body language and facial expressions. One benefit of high-quality audio vs text is that we include intonation. But it doesn't encapsulate everything.
This isn't to say we've cracked that nut with the current state of internet-transmitted video. A blanket "humans communicate via audio neglects these other channels of communication.
This 90% value is used too much without context. It is not something we can apply for all situation, or every type of information we want to convey. It’s almost seem like a magic joker when there s a debate over using video or not for meetings.
Parent misspoke and instead should have said 'you should be able to communicate effectively without words'.
Obviously the fact that we're communicating 100% of our information currently using text shows that the 90% figure is extremely misleading. 90% of our understanding of a person's character or something maybe comes from their physicality.
The context of this discussion is Zoom/Teams type meetings. My point is that low latency audio is most important in these settings. Low latency is really the key and currently seems to be an unsolved problem in MS Teams at least.
As a manager, I make it a point to try to turn my own video on most of the time, but I'd never ask someone to turn their camera on in any particular call. I want people to be able to do their best work. Building a solid team culture means you should see one another from time to time, but it doesn't have to be every call, or even most calls, and there are a lot of people who struggle from time to time to do their best work on camera.
Sometimes people are in a messy room or feel self conscious about their appearance. Sometimes people are just distracted staring at their own image on a call. Some people have to share their workspace with a partner or roommate who might be distracting in the background. Sometimes people are running something compute intensive in the background while taking a call and their computer gets too bogged down trying to encode video while also running whatever more important task it should be doing. Whatever the reason, I want people focusing on the work they are trying to do and if having their camera off lets them focus better, I'm going to encourage them to do that.