I don't care if your camera is on

I’ve worked remotely since 2014. I’ve been the only remote in the room where we used a VOIP phone for meetings (which sucked), survived the Bluejeans era semi-intact (though folks routinely forgot to turn on the meeting, so I’d sit there alone feeling sad), and lived to see the halcyon days of Zoom (which for all its foibles works REALLY WELL). A full decade of remote experience, much of it in a leadership role, and 99+% of the time, I don’t give a hoot whether you turn your video on.

A hot take?

I assumed that nobody cared whether folks’ cameras were on until I was having dinner with several other people managers and mentioned that my team is very “video off”. My companions expressed surprise that I was okay with that. They both said that it was an expectation in their teams that video be on for all meetings and mentioned providing feedback around those expectations when people’s video was off during meetings.

Establishing clear expectations within a team is super healthy and ensures that everyone’s on a level playing field. I like that part! But I strongly disagree with expecting folks to keep their cameras on. Apparently I’m in the minority: among my LinkedIn connections, camera on expectations (though generally less formalized)  seem to be the norm, but there’s also a lot of enthusiasm for not having those expectations. 

Cameras as proxies for engagement

I get the appeal of camera-on policies. When I’m giving a presentation, I greatly appreciate anyone who turns on their video and nods along with me. It’s hard to speak to nothing! (My husband has a story about teaching PHP classes online for the first time in which he took the classic advice of starting with a joke, only to realize that doesn’t work as an icebreaker when you’re staring at yourself. Apparently some kind soul eventually typed a smiley face into the chat.) As a manager, though, requiring team members’ video to be on hasn’t seemed necessary. While I love it when someone is smiling and nodding or looks confused during a meeting, there are lots of other signals that team members are engaged in the conversation, such as:

• Asking questions (verbally or in chat).
• Answering questions (verbally or in chat).
• Sharing opinions (verbally or in chat).
• Referring back to the meeting content in the future (e.g. in a 1-to-1 or on Slack).
• Taking notes and contributing to the meeting documents.

My lovely team at MongoDB were a quiet bunch, and several of them generally left their cameras off. I never wondered if they were engaged, though, because I was paying attention to the chat and folks spoke up when they had things to say. Conversely, I’ve sat in plenty of bigger manager meetings where it was very obvious that participants on the call (whose cameras were on) were multitasking in another window and weren’t paying any attention to what was being said.

Impact of camera-on policies

It’s worth recognizing that requiring meeting participants to turn their cameras on can actively hurt your team members. Fauville et al (2021) explored the concept of “Zoom fatigue” and found that women are disproportionately impacted. They attribute the discrepancy to “mirror anxiety” - the stress associated with looking at yourself all day. Shockley et al. (2021) explored “the fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings”, finding support for their theory that having one’s camera on was linked with feelings of fatigue which, in turn, related negatively to voice and engagement during meetings. There’s a much easier-to-read HBR article that goes into the study here. Science says that having your camera on is tiring, and can be especially tiring for some underrepresented groups.

Your colleague who lives with family members in a small apartment may not have an ideal background to project to the room, even with virtual backgrounds. Your colleague with gender dysphoria might have a REALLY HARD TIME being on video, having folks seeing them, and seeing themselves. Your breastfeeding colleague may need to feed their kid. Your program manager may be in their fifth hour of continuous meetings and desperately wants to do the next one from their couch in pyjamas. I don’t need to surveil people for them to do their work.

Personally, I’m a video on gal, and I’d RATHER other folks also turn on their cameras. I’m not convinced, though, that there’s value to requiring camera feeds beyond the convenience it affords me. I’d rather have my team members be focussed and comfortable than mandate camera-on “engagement theatre”. 

Thanks to Amaris Gerson, Angela Yeates, Guru Periyasamy Kanthasamy, Michael Khmelnitsky, and Samantha Campbell for weighing in on their workplace camera policies, and to the delicious BBQ restaurant in Austin, TX where the original 'camera on' conversation happened.