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I worked on two separate remote teams over the past year. The first team had video on and zoom calls and my current team has video off. Small anecdotal sample

I worked on two separate remote teams over the past year. The first team had video on and zoom calls and my current team has video off. Small anecdotal sample size, but in my experience with the video-on team there was a much stronger sense that I knew who the team was, felt responsible to them, and generally we felt more cohesive as a team even though I never met them in person. My current team no one ever turns their cameras on, I only know what they look like from their employee IDs, and I have zero sense of camaraderie with them. Meetings tend to drag on at least twice as long, since people can easily check out and stop paying attention if something doesn’t seem relevant to them. There’s no small talk or banter, and I find I just kind of listen passively while working until I hear my name and then jump back to full attention. I definitely get the sense that’s what everyone else does as well, since very few people ever speak up unless explicitly called on. Everything feels less tight and less personal. It’s great for the individual employee’s ability to crank out work, but if you care about the actual team cohesiveness and productivity, enforced video on feels like it can make a difference.

mpweiher 6y ago
Hmm...could it be that your current team is over-using synchronous communication (calls) where they should be using asynchronous communication? Intersperse occasional video calls for the other stuff.
- OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  In these two instances we have about the same amount of synchronous video calls on a weekly basis, so I don’t think there’s a difference there. I do agree that in general teams have too many synchronous calls that could be done via email or Slack messages, but as that factor did not vary among these two teams I think it’s a valid apples to apples comparison.
cwilkes 6y ago
The sidebar discussion point is interesting: this is an area where technology could help out a lot by only sharing those 2 (or 3 etc) audio streams with one another. That has the potential of being a lot less disruptive than people in a real physical room chatting. Course this will be hard to implement, just like in chat rooms where it easy to get overwhelmed by more than one conversation. Maybe have voice clues like “ask Jimmy about project Thunderdome” creating a TODO list that then are matched up with people and prompted to engage when they are free.

mpweiher 6y ago

Hmm...could it be that your current team is over-using synchronous communication (calls) where they should be using asynchronous communication? Intersperse occasional video calls for the other stuff.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
In these two instances we have about the same amount of synchronous video calls on a weekly basis, so I don’t think there’s a difference there. I do agree that in general teams have too many synchronous calls that could be done via email or Slack messages, but as that factor did not vary among these two teams I think it’s a valid apples to apples comparison.

cwilkes 6y ago

The sidebar discussion point is interesting: this is an area where technology could help out a lot by only sharing those 2 (or 3 etc) audio streams with one another. That has the potential of being a lot less disruptive than people in a real physical room chatting. Course this will be hard to implement, just like in chat rooms where it easy to get overwhelmed by more than one conversation. Maybe have voice clues like “ask Jimmy about project Thunderdome” creating a TODO list that then are matched up with people and prompted to engage when they are free.