Do People Hate Turning on Cameras in Virtual Meetings?
I have often seen that during meetings, many people keep their cameras off. I also prefer keeping it off more often than not. I have an engineer on my team whose face people haven’t seen for years (virtually). I wondered what are the motivations behind this trend.
It turns out that often there are some good reasons (logistical, social, or psychological) why keeping the cameras off does make sense in many situations.
During standups, someone usually shares a screen and goes through a JIRA board or something similar. One doesn’t want to get distracted by activity happening behind the camera of someone on the team. Keeping cameras off allows people to stay focused on the content being shared. Modern conferencing tools can detect voice activity and highlight the user so people know who is talking at a specific time.
People also like to get up and walk around (work their muscles a bit) while being on standups. One doesn’t have to be attentive 100% in long standups. If the camera is open, you will have to sit in front of it and appear attentive which can be counter-productive. The real underlying issue often is that in most meetings very few people are contributing and others are primarily playing spectators.
Weaker Internet connections can also wreck the experience of a meeting. A crystal clear voice with no percievable delay is far better than a crappy video stream.
Some people struggle with a high degree of social anxiety. Being camera on is highly uncomfortable for them.
If a company has a hybrid environment, then people anyway meet face to face on the days in office. Hence, there is not much need for building human connections during the work-from-home days.
In highly distributed global teams, people are working across different time zones. While someone is just getting up, someone else will just be going to bed in the same team. Having to be presentable all the time gets to be annoying.
A common pattern in small meetings is that people open their cameras at the meeting for a meet and greet and then go off camera when the regular discussion starts.
If one meets some people occasionally (typically from different teams), especially during solving a crisis (or resolving some issue), it’s more common to have cameras on. A lot of non-verbal cues from the camera feed can be quite useful in navigating through the crisis. Regular cadence team meetings don’t have that much of a need for facial cues.
Finally, some people feel that they have a huge RBF (go figure!) and it requires extra effort mentally and physically for them to appear normal on the camera. Some studies have shown that being on camera in a virtual meeting is more mentally taxing than an in-person meeting.
People do turn their cameras on for 1:1 meetings or if they are contributing a lot to a meeting. Sometimes, in a large group meeting, someone would turn their camera on to make a point.
Executives do tend to keep their cameras on. The kind of discussions they engage in are usually subjective with a high degree of ambiguity and difficult decision making. I guess that is the reason why they prefer having cameras on as they depend more on non-verbal communication. I know this from first-hand experience.
The idea that having cameras on makes people engaged is not grounded in reality. People will automatically get engaged if the conversation is adding value to them or if they feel they can contribute to the conversation. Cameras are certainly useful in building human connections. But they are not required in every conversation.
