12 ms·

The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings [pdf]

148 points by vector_spaces 5y ago

Leszek 5y ago
Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video. More specifically, when I'm talking in a meeting or giving a presentation, I find it very helpful to see other people, see their reactions, see whether they laugh at jokes or look confused when I'm bad at explaining things. My nightmare during remote work is giving a presentation to a silent wall of "camera off" icons.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  I've worked from home for a decade now, and I've found the people who want cameras on in meetings are the folks who don't normally work remote. They're not used to not seeing reactions, so it throws them when nobody has a camera on. The people who have worked remote for a while - at least since before covid - don't ever use their camera.
  - youeseh 5y ago
    Having worked remotely before and since Covid, I prefer to at least keep my camera on. I think it makes me more approachable... as approachable as can be expected anyway. I've also been in large meetings where everyone has the camera off - it doesn't bother me, but given a choice between not seeing people and seeing people, I would choose seeing people.
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    I have worked remote as freelance many years, and I just use the camera as a reciprocity tool, if you have your camera on, then I'll turn mine on, if yours is off, then I won't bother with it and I have no issue/lots of experience working/talking without the camera
  - atq2119 5y ago
    It's not even about home office work necessarily, it's about whether there's a long-term culture of having remote conversation. The company I work for is old by tech standards, and has always had fairly distributed offices. People there have been doing remote conferencing long before video conferences were a thing, and the culture is a bit mixed but leaning heavily towards not turning on video.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
      Excellent point
  - cfn 5y ago
    Same here. Video meetings used to be the exception but since last year it is rare that anyone uses sound only meetings. One thing that annoys me with video is that I try really hard to look directly into the camera but fail miserably and instead keep checking my image as if it was a mirror :)
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    I've worked remote for over a decade and our company has never used video, only audio. This year we used it in lieu of our yearly in-person get-together, and outside of the first 5 minutes of "long time no see" at least for me it added nothing to the actual meeting. For instance, I like to pace around the room during meetings to help think and with video that's just awkward.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  We've had a couple people prove at work that you can prerecord your presentation, force-mute everyone using the mod tools, and then play it back and they'll never realize it was a recording unless you're showing your background on it. (I'm not very dependent on human social anything, so I don't really know how to speak to the rest of it, sorry.)
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  This is true and also something we eventually get used to I think. I've seen the same flow happening IRL, where people new to the team expected a somewhat responsive crowd when they present, just to be met with a wall of laptop screens and inscrutable faces when the time comes. To be clear the people in the room were paying attention, and effectively cross checking info and exploring the points they wanted to focus on. They just didn't give any feedback to the presenter until the end of the presentation, when it's time to discuss the details. It can be seen as socially rude, but to us it was really efficient: instead of telling the presenter we'll give feedback another time, at the end of the presentation we already had a rough opinion with a modicum of confidence in the numbers or facts to discuss. Doing all of that checking before the meeting is another way to do it, but honestly I'm not sure it's much better.
  - stripline 5y ago
    I can echo OP - have given a lot of presentations over the past year to blank screens. I used to enjoy presenting and thought it was one of my strengths, now I end every presentation with that sinking feeling like I bombed. Maybe I just need the feedback, but I also feel like I can tailor the presentation to the audience better if I pick up on body language in person. For example I may quickly gloss over a slide or spend ten minutes explaining the background depending on how the audience is keeping up.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I feel for you. I don't know if there is a good equivalent nowadays to the feedback you got. When it comes to low stakes, wide range presentations, an approximation I've seen was a side "reaction" channel on Slack or Discord to share random thoughts during the presentation. It gets very memey and you need an audience that is used to random chats, but there is an actual feeling of back and forth between the presenter and the audience. You'll see emojis and reaction gifs flying around when people get engaged, questions that you can scoop along the way or keep for the Q&A section afterward, etc.
- izacus 5y ago
  > Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video. Both can be true right? This study just studied the effect of persons own camera while participating. However, it doesn't really say much about how turning off camera affects other participants that are now left without the visual feedback.
  - Leszek 5y ago
    Fair point - I was being careful with phrasing because I have a pet peeve about people trying to disprove research with anecdotes, but you're right that this is a somewhat different scenario. Indeed, supposing that both this research and my anecdote are valid, it'd be a rather unfortunate asymmetry in remote work, a fatigue issue that has no good solution which doesn't require one of the participants to compromise.
- varispeed 5y ago
  You don't know if the look at something else and listen to you at all. If there are boring meetings it's quite common for people to use split screen or a second computer and browse something or read and vaguely paying attention. For this reason we decided to not bother with cameras.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I've been remote a long time -- see my other comment uptopic -- and part of my job involves long workshops for training or configuration. I absolutely agree some aspects of this would be easier in person, but I do NOT think they'd be easier with cameras on, because mostly when these workshops are happening the screen is dominated by either a presentation or someone's shared screen so we can work together. A column of postage-stamp sized faces isn't going to help with engagement-measurement. I did a lot of in-person presentations before, and one thing I had to learn is that remote facilitation/presentation is a different skill. You figure out other ways to discern who's keeping up, e.g.
boopmaster 5y ago
I have anxiety about being on camera, it’s like a public speaking skill set. There’s also environmental concerns (can they see the underwear on the floor?) that can creep in to distract away from what is important (not my face!). Video of my face is exhausting. I’m not a paid actor, and I’m not a YouTube star with a studio. Over time, I have found ways to feel better about being on camera, and that’s bern the acquisition of streamer-grade equipment where I can control to zoom and focus and contrast etc and punch the colors and film grain up to distracting levels. I want my video to distract you! Not me, so yeah I will tune it up so I’ve turned my face into purple chunky vasoline and now it’s your problem to think through, and not so much mine. Hope that helps! (Leave me alone with the camera FFS)
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
I believe what we're witnessing here is a battle between the fashions of a time gone by overlapping with the fashions (and expectations) of a newer generation growing up with "asynchronous everything" There was a time when you were paid to "be present" physically. ie, fill the seat in a room where discussions happened, however meaningful (or not) your contribution to the matter at hand. Time and technology changed and productivity of an individual, especially in CS disciplines far out grew expectations of organizational structure. This is opinion only, but in this day and age, having meetings where there are a LOT of people talking and you're not an active participant seems to me an indication of skewed expectations of presence. You don't need to have your camera on all the time if your contribution to the meeting is simply saying nothing or even saying a few lines in the middle of an hour long discussion. Maybe we need to stop thinking that "Virtual meetings" are simply digital manifestations of what people used to do in real life. The world has changed significantly and we are still doing what people did decades ago, only in newer ways and calling it progress. People "online" have vastly different presence than ones stuck in a physical room and can multi task . . walk in a park, do the dishes, play a video game on the couch and still participate constructively if the requirement is simple passive participation in a discussion (Which most meetings today seem to be) I'd say we need a deeper probe into these thieves of productive time where people simply fill calendars with blocks of time or send of hundreds of emails a month with very little progress to show for it and dig into how we optimize that for all of humanities benefit.
hprotagonist 5y ago
Why — though in the early days of interlace's internetted teleputers that operated off largely the same fiber-digital grid as the phone companies, the advent of video-telephoning (a.k.a. 'videophony') enjoyed an interval of huge consumer popularity — callers thrilled at the idea of phone-interfacing both aurally and facially (the little first-generation phone-video cameras being too crude and narrow-apertured for anything much more than facial close-ups) on first- generation teleputers that at that time were little more than high-tech tv sets, though of course they had that little 'intelligent-agent' homuncular icon that would appear at the lower-right of a broadcast/cable program and tell you the time and temperature outside or remind you to take your blood-pressure medication or alert you to a particularly compelling entertainment-option now coming up on channel like 491 or something, or of course now alerting you to an incoming video-phone call and then tap-dancing with a little iconic straw boater and cane just under a menu of possible options for response, and callers did love their little homuncular icons — but Why, within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve for 'videophony' suddenly collapsed like a kicked tent, so that, by the year of the depend adult undergarment, fewer than 10% of all private telephone communications utilized any video-image-fiber data-transfers or coincident products and services, the average u.s. phone-user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech bell-era voice-only telephonic interface after all, a preferential about-face that cost a good many precipitant video-telephony-related entrepreneurs their shirts, plus destabilizing two highly respected mutual funds that had ground-floored heavily in video-phone technology, andvery nearly wiping out the maryland state employees' retirement system's freddie-mac fund, a fund whose administrator's mistress's brother had been an almost manically precipitant video-phone-technology entrepreneur . . . and but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning? The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self- obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
- psychomugs 5y ago
  Came here to post this and glad I was beaten to it. While the prediction of video conferencing isn’t that wild (in the same way that Kubrick predicting tablets in 2001 isn’t that wild), the user anxiety that led to the mask/face filter industry was really genius.
digitalsushi 5y ago
I find it a bit amusing, and a bit tiring, how our body language and emotive faces have instantly reacted to network drops and lags; at your next meeting watch how vigorously your teammates nod, and how wide they smile, and how much teeth they show, so that the faintest smirk will be remembered.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  On that note, I've noticed that the height at which my hands are doing gestures has changed to accommodate my work laptop's webcam...
tkgally 5y ago
From the abstract: “[W]e propose and test a model where study condition (camera on versus off) was linked to daily feelings of fatigue; daily fatigue, in turn, was presumed to relate negatively to voice and engagement during virtual meetings. We further predict that gender and organizational tenure will moderate this relationship such that using a camera during virtual meetings will be more fatiguing for women and newer members of the organization. Results of 1,408 daily observations from 103 employees supported our proposed model....” I teach at a university and, since early last year, have been working exclusively from home. An interesting change has occurred in our online faculty meetings over that period. At first, when we were still getting used to videoconferencing, most meetings were conducted with most people’s cameras on. Over time, however, more and more of the meetings have been conducted with almost everyone keeping their cameras off; in many meetings, people turn their cameras on only when they are speaking and often not even then. When we started teaching online last April, we were told not to require students to turn on their cameras during class (out of respect for their privacy), and it seems that most classes are indeed being conducted with the students’ cameras off. I personally find that frustrating; I am not as easily able to remember students as individuals, even in small classes, when I never see their faces. (Otherwise, I don't mind online teaching at all.) For faculty meetings, though, I haven't heard any complaints about cameras being off, and the meetings seem to be as effective online with limited video as they used to be when conducted in person. In one-on-one conversations, both cameras are usually on. I, at least, find that works as well as in-person conversations, and I much prefer one-on-one videoconferencing to telephone conversations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  Avatars should be solution for you then, right?
  - tkgally 5y ago
    Yes, avatars would help me remember students better. They would need to be usable in Zoom, as that is the platform our university has chosen for the time being.
snek_case 5y ago
I think it's because, in real life, you can tell who's looking at you and when. There's key components of body language that are based in who is paying attention to who. In a videoconference, this is all missing. You can't tell who's looking at you or not, so that mean anyone could be looking at you, so you act like everyone is looking at you all the time, you feel the need to control your presentation more, that causes fatigue. Real-world group conversations are not like that at all. If you're tired or you have nothing to say, you can just be in a corner listening to other people speak, nobody will mind, and you don't feel observed. That's a lot more like when you have your camera off.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  This is why I almost always minimize my own video on my screen. Just seeing myself makes me really self conscious.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Unless I’m presenting or speaking for more than an interjection, I generally turn off the sending of video. There’s little value (IMO) in 320p/720p low bitrate “facial expressions” which are just as often compression artifacts as they are information about emotional state. Maybe once video calls are routinely 1080p/2160p it will matter more, but 320p (the default for most systems today) at a low bitrate isn’t really doing much. You might as well shut it off unless you’re leading the meeting at that moment. Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light.
    - thecoppinger 5y ago
      > Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light. I recently did a fair bit of research into this exact setup and landed on a Logitech StreamCam and a Elgato Key Light. Well worth the money if you’re interested in achieving a high consumer grade level of quality, just be sure to purchase an adapter for the StreamCam as it is (infuriatingly) wired with a USB C connector.
noisy_boy 5y ago
Several people on our team do not turn-on video during meetings. I also do not like to turn-on video for our stand-up calls - those are fact oriented and whatever I'm saying is sufficient to convey the details (one-on-one meetings would be a different scenario). Citrix on Linux seems to have issues exposing external webcams and this has worked to my advantage because once I found out about this issue, I simply presented that as the reason and for once, treatment of Linux as a second class citizen worked out to be in my favour.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  > treatment of Linux as a second class citizen worked out to be in my favour. I don't know if being able to "get away with" not turning on your video is really in your favor. I am probably rare in this, but probably every month I end up seeing that someone is visibly stressed/exhausted on a Zoom, ask them about it and we usually end up talking about it and solving it. Like "holly shit noisy_boy, you look really tired - everything OK?" could give you a chance to open up about your concerns about your work or family stress that would otherwise never come up in a factual update, and as a manager, there's a TON I can help with once I am aware. To be fair I am probably in a minority of people who look for this kind of thing but just pointing out "hiding" isn't always good.
  - nxpnsv 5y ago
    I hope you save comments like that for 1:1, clearly it is overstepping for a standup...
    - xyzelement 5y ago
      > I hope you save comments like that for 1:1, clearly it is overstepping for a standup... It depends on the person, team, and situation. Obviously there are more sensitive contexts where discretion is needed. When I don't think that's necessary, I err on the side of just asking. I want my team to do this to each other too.
- tsjq 5y ago
  yes. 95% of meetings at my office do not ask for video. one day the manager joked: "anyone who wants other parties to turn on video , should inform atleast a two hours in advance. we need to shave, find an ironed shirt and put it on, make arrangements for kids / pets to stay outside of the room."
ulrashida 5y ago
It feels like there are far too few controls on this study for anything other than "more research is required" conclusions. Notably: 1. Did fatigued and non-fatigued users participate in the same style of camera display? Were they held in presentation, face to face, or "Brady Bunch" mode? Did users have self-view on, shrunk, or off? 2. Of the 100ish participants selected, where is the control group who received no guidance on when to turn cameras on or off? Do they have a similar variation in fatigue between genders and weeks? 3. It seems odd that the gender variance in fatigue was selected for review and the managerial / employee division was not. Given that 45% of the sample was supervisory this would have been a useful element to understand. One would normally expect that supervisors will be less fatigued by video camera use as it may be their policy, or they may have more experience. A related take on the topic (albeit without a field experiment) can be found at https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2 https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2
matsemann 5y ago
What I find fatiguing when doing a whole-day of meetings remote compared to in person, is that there is no small-talk, no breaks where you get to know the others etc. Just business for X hours straight.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  My approach to this -- and I get that it comes from a position of privilege -- is that I encourage (well, almost enforce, or insist on) a bit of small-talk and socialization at the beginnings of all my meetings. I can do this because I'm almost always leading or facilitating, and quite often I meet with the same set of people several times a week for several weeks, so I get some sense of their personal lives. "How was your daughter's birthday?" or whatever goes a long way to normalizing the interaction, creating a sort of soft-space for chat, and keeping it from being wall-to-wall business.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    Yeah, the problem is when it's like 5-6+ people in the meeting. A round around the "table" feels forced. But normally it would be groups of 2-3 chatting by themselves before the meeting really starts, that is lost when remote and everyone hears everyone and there can only be 1 conversation.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > I encourage (well, almost enforce, or insist on) a bit of small-talk and socialization at the beginnings of all my meetings. We have an executive who insists on doing this, too, and it's universally hated. You can't force small talk, and when he does, it just makes things awkward for everyone. It's even worse when he tries to force the issue by singling someone out with a small-talky question like your example "How was your daugher's birthday". The person being singled out is then in the hotseat and the discomfort in their voice while they scramble to come up with an answer is palpable. It's like being put on public display.
    - ubermonkey 5y ago
blitzar 5y ago
How about "The Fatiguing Effects of In-Person Meetings"? > popular press discussion of virtual meeting fatigue (i.e.,“Zoom fatigue”), described as a feeling of being drained and lacking energy following a day of virtual meetings. I am sure I am not the only person to have felt the effects of so-called 'meeting fatigue', being drained and lacking in energy following a day of sitting in meetings in person. This piece reminds me of several 'The impact of working from home' pieces that seem to assume two states exist, working from home or doing nothing. Yes working from home has had an impact, but so did waking up at 5am and standing on a packed commuter train for 45 minutes, before wedging into an uncomfortable fluorescent cubicle for 8 hours, making sure you were 'seen', before turning around and packing into the train with the same people from the morning all over again. If you are in 'zoom meetings' back to back all day then I assume pre covid / wfh you either were in 'in-person meetings' back to back all day or have inserted a large number of additional meetings that did not exist before.
- eloeffler 5y ago
  True, this is often compared to the "traditional" way off physical meetings without reflecting that they can laso be seen as an alternative to something else istead of being something like the baseline. And there actually is meeting fatigue caused by often badly ventilated meeting rooms.
  - lostphilosopher 5y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2019/03/21/all-that-hot-air-in-meetings-makes-us-dumber-and-the-reason-why-will-shock-you/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2019/03/21/all-that-... (just as a reference for that last point)
    - eloeffler 5y ago
      Thanks
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Yes, meetings are awful whether in person or remote, but for me, the remote ones are worse.
FriedrichN 5y ago
Virtual meetings are usually much shorter, so in my experience a lot less fatiguing than IRL meetings (especially if I have to drive somewhere). Long meetings, virtual or in meatspace are always fatiguing. And they're very unnecessary almost all of the time. But I prefer it when people have their camera on, that way I can tell whether or not they're engaged or not. And because of this 'being watched' effect meetings tend to be shorter.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Oh, man, you're lucky! Not only are our virtual meetings no shorter than the old in-person ones, but we get to have a lot more of them, too!
liotier 5y ago
Our (large French telco) remote practice, inherited from when we switched to flex office a couple of years before COVID: almost never video but almost always screen sharing. I feel that screen sharing is a much more productive use of screen real estate !
Dumblydorr 5y ago
I personally don't get meeting fatigue, I like a bit of human interaction that isn't my partner. I moreso don't like useless meetings or feeling a meeting is unnecessary but I'm attending to keep my superiors happy.
bamboozled 5y ago
One thing I find that's different is that it's harder to do simple stuff like go to the toilet on the video call. When I used to be in a physical meeting, I'd get up and leave the room if there was a lull in conversation, it signaled I had left. On a zoom call, you could go to the toilet with your headphones or whatever, but it's harder to get a gap in conversation (there's always a speaker), and I don't like to trust mute with a poop.
- emdubbelyou 5y ago
  A few people on my team use virtual backgrounds that say “be right back”. You can set your background to that if you need to step away from your computer. Some add little emojis (like brewing coffee) or other things to personalize it.
cybervegan 5y ago
As an autistic person, I think this is a useful lesson for the neurotypical population on what we go through in daily life. Zoom fatigue seems to be very much like the social fatigue aspies tend to experience - where non-verbal cues are scrambled and hard to interpret to the point you spend a large amount of mental energy to try to compensate. Welcome to our world, "normies" :-).
varispeed 5y ago
We simply don't use cameras. Sometimes a person would turn it on to show something, but that's it. There is absolutely no need to be visible at all times.
jpm_sd 5y ago
At this point I only turn my camera on for 1:1 meetings. It's distracting and useless for larger groups. Even in 1:1s I hate being unable to actually make eye contact, it's consistently confusing.
karlkloss 5y ago
Now we need an investigation comparing VR meetings to flat screen meetings. I find VR meetings much better, but it highly depends on the quality of the VR goggles and the software. And of course you need some time to get used to VR.
nsmog767 5y ago
bit of a different perspective, but I simultaneously believe: a) Video is draining, like this study (and all the anecdotes in comments) attest to; b) You need video at least a majority of the time to maintain any type of human relationship with people in a remote environment. Maybe the problem isn't the video, but an abundance of meetings. Fewer meetings = less fatigue!
ubermonkey 5y ago
I have worked at home, or as a high-travel person, for almost 20 years. It started when I hung my own shingle out after the dot-com crash, and then continued into two small firms. The first one folded in 2007, but I've been with the second one since then (so, 14 years this month). Both firms had geographically diverse teams, and neither have any office space anywhere. Until about 10 years ago, I did a lot of client-facing travel. Then, all of a sudden (seemingly), that stopped. In retrospect I think it was because in-person visits for our work (implementation of our project management system with large-scale customers) really does not need it. What you need is time with us so we can help you configure, and train you, and troubleshoot with you, etc -- and that works GREAT over GoToMeeting (or WebEx or whatever you prefer). If you want us on site, you're paying for WAY more hours, plus you're paying for flights, hotels, meals, rental cars, etc. AND if we have to go to you, we can't do other work for other customers while we're in your office, which makes US less efficient, so the telepresence approach is a big win on both sides. *We have never ever ever turns on cameras* as part of this work. This was true before COVID, because they were not a value-add at all. This is especially true during COVID when so many are working with home-grade internet packages with really crappy upload speeds. The video sabotages the audio and screensharing, and brings nothing useful in return, at least for us. I'm waiting for the rest of the economy to realize this. Several of our customer parties are in organizations that have decided YOU MUST TURN ON YOUR CAMERA or whatever, and we occasionally get questions about our refusal. As vendors, though, we're in a position to just say no.
mmaunder 5y ago
I've been advocating for voice-only calls for remote teams for years. Most people think I'm nuts. Cameras are only there to try and emulate an office environment. But the effect they have on employee flexibility and meeting style is profound. Once you turn the camera on you need to dress as if you're in the office, even though you're at home. You need to design your camera background to look professional i.e. emulate the office, even though it's your home. Your partner, kids or guests don't get to walk through the room anymore without creating anxiety in you - even thought it's your home. Voice only? It's a different world. You can dress the way you'd dress at home. You can have family and friends walking by without an issue. You don't have to turn your home into some kind of stage that pretends to be an office. But voice has even greater benefits: It's lower bandwidth so you can travel more freely. You can use push to talk to mask background noise when you're on a group call. Voice also has a leveling effect among colleagues so it stops being about who is the best looking, has the nicest haircut, or the fanciest suit. It's about a purely intellectual connection with your colleagues. In that sense, voice only is a leveler and an enabler. It breaks down barriers. At Defiant (our 38 person cybersecurity company) we've been doing voice only since we started hiring. I designed our collaboration this way because I was a fone phreak in the early 1990s (hanging out on #phreak on effnet) and I collaborated with my best friends voice only and via text on IRC, in some cases for years. So I knew going into building a software company that I could make voice-only collaboration work along with text. We started hiring and going voice only in 2015, when even the idea of remote was absurd to many companies. Now, in 2021, we have the Fortune 5000 stumbling into remote work and doing their damndest to emulate the office environment. And the camera is a core part of that attempt to emulate. Not only does it have strong negatives, like the fatigue the study mentions, but it also doesn't take advantage of the benefits of voice-only and having a truly intellectual, relaxed, and collaborative environment between remote colleagues. We use Teamspeak for our big team calls with PTT enabled which is a game changer for noisy environments. And we use mostly slack calls for one on one or small groups.
JohnFen 5y ago
In my workplace, use of the camera for Zoom meetings is optional, and 100% of everyone opts not to. I think it makes things much better. Not as good as not having Zoom meetings at all, but still, it's better.

148 points by vector_spaces 5y ago

Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video. More specifically, when I'm talking in a meeting or giving a presentation, I find it very helpful to see other people, see their reactions, see whether they laugh at jokes or look confused when I'm bad at explaining things. My nightmare during remote work is giving a presentation to a silent wall of "camera off" icons.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
I've worked from home for a decade now, and I've found the people who want cameras on in meetings are the folks who don't normally work remote. They're not used to not seeing reactions, so it throws them when nobody has a camera on. The people who have worked remote for a while - at least since before covid - don't ever use their camera.
- youeseh 5y ago
  Having worked remotely before and since Covid, I prefer to at least keep my camera on. I think it makes me more approachable... as approachable as can be expected anyway. I've also been in large meetings where everyone has the camera off - it doesn't bother me, but given a choice between not seeing people and seeing people, I would choose seeing people.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  I have worked remote as freelance many years, and I just use the camera as a reciprocity tool, if you have your camera on, then I'll turn mine on, if yours is off, then I won't bother with it and I have no issue/lots of experience working/talking without the camera
- atq2119 5y ago
  It's not even about home office work necessarily, it's about whether there's a long-term culture of having remote conversation. The company I work for is old by tech standards, and has always had fairly distributed offices. People there have been doing remote conferencing long before video conferences were a thing, and the culture is a bit mixed but leaning heavily towards not turning on video.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    Excellent point
- cfn 5y ago
  Same here. Video meetings used to be the exception but since last year it is rare that anyone uses sound only meetings. One thing that annoys me with video is that I try really hard to look directly into the camera but fail miserably and instead keep checking my image as if it was a mirror :)
- kalleboo 5y ago
  I've worked remote for over a decade and our company has never used video, only audio. This year we used it in lieu of our yearly in-person get-together, and outside of the first 5 minutes of "long time no see" at least for me it added nothing to the actual meeting. For instance, I like to pace around the room during meetings to help think and with video that's just awkward.
floatingatoll 5y ago
We've had a couple people prove at work that you can prerecord your presentation, force-mute everyone using the mod tools, and then play it back and they'll never realize it was a recording unless you're showing your background on it. (I'm not very dependent on human social anything, so I don't really know how to speak to the rest of it, sorry.)
makeitdouble 5y ago
This is true and also something we eventually get used to I think. I've seen the same flow happening IRL, where people new to the team expected a somewhat responsive crowd when they present, just to be met with a wall of laptop screens and inscrutable faces when the time comes. To be clear the people in the room were paying attention, and effectively cross checking info and exploring the points they wanted to focus on. They just didn't give any feedback to the presenter until the end of the presentation, when it's time to discuss the details. It can be seen as socially rude, but to us it was really efficient: instead of telling the presenter we'll give feedback another time, at the end of the presentation we already had a rough opinion with a modicum of confidence in the numbers or facts to discuss. Doing all of that checking before the meeting is another way to do it, but honestly I'm not sure it's much better.
- stripline 5y ago
  I can echo OP - have given a lot of presentations over the past year to blank screens. I used to enjoy presenting and thought it was one of my strengths, now I end every presentation with that sinking feeling like I bombed. Maybe I just need the feedback, but I also feel like I can tailor the presentation to the audience better if I pick up on body language in person. For example I may quickly gloss over a slide or spend ten minutes explaining the background depending on how the audience is keeping up.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I feel for you. I don't know if there is a good equivalent nowadays to the feedback you got. When it comes to low stakes, wide range presentations, an approximation I've seen was a side "reaction" channel on Slack or Discord to share random thoughts during the presentation. It gets very memey and you need an audience that is used to random chats, but there is an actual feeling of back and forth between the presenter and the audience. You'll see emojis and reaction gifs flying around when people get engaged, questions that you can scoop along the way or keep for the Q&A section afterward, etc.
izacus 5y ago
> Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video. Both can be true right? This study just studied the effect of persons own camera while participating. However, it doesn't really say much about how turning off camera affects other participants that are now left without the visual feedback.
- Leszek 5y ago
  Fair point - I was being careful with phrasing because I have a pet peeve about people trying to disprove research with anecdotes, but you're right that this is a somewhat different scenario. Indeed, supposing that both this research and my anecdote are valid, it'd be a rather unfortunate asymmetry in remote work, a fatigue issue that has no good solution which doesn't require one of the participants to compromise.
varispeed 5y ago
You don't know if the look at something else and listen to you at all. If there are boring meetings it's quite common for people to use split screen or a second computer and browse something or read and vaguely paying attention. For this reason we decided to not bother with cameras.
ubermonkey 5y ago
I've been remote a long time -- see my other comment uptopic -- and part of my job involves long workshops for training or configuration. I absolutely agree some aspects of this would be easier in person, but I do NOT think they'd be easier with cameras on, because mostly when these workshops are happening the screen is dominated by either a presentation or someone's shared screen so we can work together. A column of postage-stamp sized faces isn't going to help with engagement-measurement. I did a lot of in-person presentations before, and one thing I had to learn is that remote facilitation/presentation is a different skill. You figure out other ways to discern who's keeping up, e.g.

boopmaster 5y ago

I have anxiety about being on camera, it’s like a public speaking skill set. There’s also environmental concerns (can they see the underwear on the floor?) that can creep in to distract away from what is important (not my face!). Video of my face is exhausting. I’m not a paid actor, and I’m not a YouTube star with a studio. Over time, I have found ways to feel better about being on camera, and that’s bern the acquisition of streamer-grade equipment where I can control to zoom and focus and contrast etc and punch the colors and film grain up to distracting levels. I want my video to distract you! Not me, so yeah I will tune it up so I’ve turned my face into purple chunky vasoline and now it’s your problem to think through, and not so much mine. Hope that helps! (Leave me alone with the camera FFS)

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

I believe what we're witnessing here is a battle between the fashions of a time gone by overlapping with the fashions (and expectations) of a newer generation growing up with "asynchronous everything" There was a time when you were paid to "be present" physically. ie, fill the seat in a room where discussions happened, however meaningful (or not) your contribution to the matter at hand. Time and technology changed and productivity of an individual, especially in CS disciplines far out grew expectations of organizational structure. This is opinion only, but in this day and age, having meetings where there are a LOT of people talking and you're not an active participant seems to me an indication of skewed expectations of presence. You don't need to have your camera on all the time if your contribution to the meeting is simply saying nothing or even saying a few lines in the middle of an hour long discussion. Maybe we need to stop thinking that "Virtual meetings" are simply digital manifestations of what people used to do in real life. The world has changed significantly and we are still doing what people did decades ago, only in newer ways and calling it progress. People "online" have vastly different presence than ones stuck in a physical room and can multi task . . walk in a park, do the dishes, play a video game on the couch and still participate constructively if the requirement is simple passive participation in a discussion (Which most meetings today seem to be) I'd say we need a deeper probe into these thieves of productive time where people simply fill calendars with blocks of time or send of hundreds of emails a month with very little progress to show for it and dig into how we optimize that for all of humanities benefit.

hprotagonist 5y ago

Why — though in the early days of interlace's internetted teleputers that operated off largely the same fiber-digital grid as the phone companies, the advent of video-telephoning (a.k.a. 'videophony') enjoyed an interval of huge consumer popularity — callers thrilled at the idea of phone-interfacing both aurally and facially (the little first-generation phone-video cameras being too crude and narrow-apertured for anything much more than facial close-ups) on first- generation teleputers that at that time were little more than high-tech tv sets, though of course they had that little 'intelligent-agent' homuncular icon that would appear at the lower-right of a broadcast/cable program and tell you the time and temperature outside or remind you to take your blood-pressure medication or alert you to a particularly compelling entertainment-option now coming up on channel like 491 or something, or of course now alerting you to an incoming video-phone call and then tap-dancing with a little iconic straw boater and cane just under a menu of possible options for response, and callers did love their little homuncular icons — but Why, within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve for 'videophony' suddenly collapsed like a kicked tent, so that, by the year of the depend adult undergarment, fewer than 10% of all private telephone communications utilized any video-image-fiber data-transfers or coincident products and services, the average u.s. phone-user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech bell-era voice-only telephonic interface after all, a preferential about-face that cost a good many precipitant video-telephony-related entrepreneurs their shirts, plus destabilizing two highly respected mutual funds that had ground-floored heavily in video-phone technology, andvery nearly wiping out the maryland state employees' retirement system's freddie-mac fund, a fund whose administrator's mistress's brother had been an almost manically precipitant video-phone-technology entrepreneur . . . and but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning? The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self- obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

psychomugs 5y ago
Came here to post this and glad I was beaten to it. While the prediction of video conferencing isn’t that wild (in the same way that Kubrick predicting tablets in 2001 isn’t that wild), the user anxiety that led to the mask/face filter industry was really genius.

digitalsushi 5y ago

I find it a bit amusing, and a bit tiring, how our body language and emotive faces have instantly reacted to network drops and lags; at your next meeting watch how vigorously your teammates nod, and how wide they smile, and how much teeth they show, so that the faintest smirk will be remembered.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
On that note, I've noticed that the height at which my hands are doing gestures has changed to accommodate my work laptop's webcam...

tkgally 5y ago

From the abstract: “[W]e propose and test a model where study condition (camera on versus off) was linked to daily feelings of fatigue; daily fatigue, in turn, was presumed to relate negatively to voice and engagement during virtual meetings. We further predict that gender and organizational tenure will moderate this relationship such that using a camera during virtual meetings will be more fatiguing for women and newer members of the organization. Results of 1,408 daily observations from 103 employees supported our proposed model....” I teach at a university and, since early last year, have been working exclusively from home. An interesting change has occurred in our online faculty meetings over that period. At first, when we were still getting used to videoconferencing, most meetings were conducted with most people’s cameras on. Over time, however, more and more of the meetings have been conducted with almost everyone keeping their cameras off; in many meetings, people turn their cameras on only when they are speaking and often not even then. When we started teaching online last April, we were told not to require students to turn on their cameras during class (out of respect for their privacy), and it seems that most classes are indeed being conducted with the students’ cameras off. I personally find that frustrating; I am not as easily able to remember students as individuals, even in small classes, when I never see their faces. (Otherwise, I don't mind online teaching at all.) For faculty meetings, though, I haven't heard any complaints about cameras being off, and the meetings seem to be as effective online with limited video as they used to be when conducted in person. In one-on-one conversations, both cameras are usually on. I, at least, find that works as well as in-person conversations, and I much prefer one-on-one videoconferencing to telephone conversations.

deleted 5y ago
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mirekrusin 5y ago
Avatars should be solution for you then, right?
- tkgally 5y ago
  Yes, avatars would help me remember students better. They would need to be usable in Zoom, as that is the platform our university has chosen for the time being.

snek_case 5y ago

I think it's because, in real life, you can tell who's looking at you and when. There's key components of body language that are based in who is paying attention to who. In a videoconference, this is all missing. You can't tell who's looking at you or not, so that mean anyone could be looking at you, so you act like everyone is looking at you all the time, you feel the need to control your presentation more, that causes fatigue. Real-world group conversations are not like that at all. If you're tired or you have nothing to say, you can just be in a corner listening to other people speak, nobody will mind, and you don't feel observed. That's a lot more like when you have your camera off.

polishdude20 5y ago
This is why I almost always minimize my own video on my screen. Just seeing myself makes me really self conscious.
- sneak 5y ago
  Unless I’m presenting or speaking for more than an interjection, I generally turn off the sending of video. There’s little value (IMO) in 320p/720p low bitrate “facial expressions” which are just as often compression artifacts as they are information about emotional state. Maybe once video calls are routinely 1080p/2160p it will matter more, but 320p (the default for most systems today) at a low bitrate isn’t really doing much. You might as well shut it off unless you’re leading the meeting at that moment. Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light.
  - thecoppinger 5y ago
    > Contrariwise, when you are speaking/presenting, use an external camera (the one in your laptop/ipad/phone is optimized for thickness and thus the lens sucks) and a good soft key light. I recently did a fair bit of research into this exact setup and landed on a Logitech StreamCam and a Elgato Key Light. Well worth the money if you’re interested in achieving a high consumer grade level of quality, just be sure to purchase an adapter for the StreamCam as it is (infuriatingly) wired with a USB C connector.

noisy_boy 5y ago

Several people on our team do not turn-on video during meetings. I also do not like to turn-on video for our stand-up calls - those are fact oriented and whatever I'm saying is sufficient to convey the details (one-on-one meetings would be a different scenario). Citrix on Linux seems to have issues exposing external webcams and this has worked to my advantage because once I found out about this issue, I simply presented that as the reason and for once, treatment of Linux as a second class citizen worked out to be in my favour.

xyzelement 5y ago
> treatment of Linux as a second class citizen worked out to be in my favour. I don't know if being able to "get away with" not turning on your video is really in your favor. I am probably rare in this, but probably every month I end up seeing that someone is visibly stressed/exhausted on a Zoom, ask them about it and we usually end up talking about it and solving it. Like "holly shit noisy_boy, you look really tired - everything OK?" could give you a chance to open up about your concerns about your work or family stress that would otherwise never come up in a factual update, and as a manager, there's a TON I can help with once I am aware. To be fair I am probably in a minority of people who look for this kind of thing but just pointing out "hiding" isn't always good.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  I hope you save comments like that for 1:1, clearly it is overstepping for a standup...
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    > I hope you save comments like that for 1:1, clearly it is overstepping for a standup... It depends on the person, team, and situation. Obviously there are more sensitive contexts where discretion is needed. When I don't think that's necessary, I err on the side of just asking. I want my team to do this to each other too.
tsjq 5y ago
yes. 95% of meetings at my office do not ask for video. one day the manager joked: "anyone who wants other parties to turn on video , should inform atleast a two hours in advance. we need to shave, find an ironed shirt and put it on, make arrangements for kids / pets to stay outside of the room."

ulrashida 5y ago

It feels like there are far too few controls on this study for anything other than "more research is required" conclusions. Notably: 1. Did fatigued and non-fatigued users participate in the same style of camera display? Were they held in presentation, face to face, or "Brady Bunch" mode? Did users have self-view on, shrunk, or off? 2. Of the 100ish participants selected, where is the control group who received no guidance on when to turn cameras on or off? Do they have a similar variation in fatigue between genders and weeks? 3. It seems odd that the gender variance in fatigue was selected for review and the managerial / employee division was not. Given that 45% of the sample was supervisory this would have been a useful element to understand. One would normally expect that supervisors will be less fatigued by video camera use as it may be their policy, or they may have more experience. A related take on the topic (albeit without a field experiment) can be found at https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2 https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2

matsemann 5y ago

What I find fatiguing when doing a whole-day of meetings remote compared to in person, is that there is no small-talk, no breaks where you get to know the others etc. Just business for X hours straight.

ubermonkey 5y ago
My approach to this -- and I get that it comes from a position of privilege -- is that I encourage (well, almost enforce, or insist on) a bit of small-talk and socialization at the beginnings of all my meetings. I can do this because I'm almost always leading or facilitating, and quite often I meet with the same set of people several times a week for several weeks, so I get some sense of their personal lives. "How was your daughter's birthday?" or whatever goes a long way to normalizing the interaction, creating a sort of soft-space for chat, and keeping it from being wall-to-wall business.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Yeah, the problem is when it's like 5-6+ people in the meeting. A round around the "table" feels forced. But normally it would be groups of 2-3 chatting by themselves before the meeting really starts, that is lost when remote and everyone hears everyone and there can only be 1 conversation.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > I encourage (well, almost enforce, or insist on) a bit of small-talk and socialization at the beginnings of all my meetings. We have an executive who insists on doing this, too, and it's universally hated. You can't force small talk, and when he does, it just makes things awkward for everyone. It's even worse when he tries to force the issue by singling someone out with a small-talky question like your example "How was your daugher's birthday". The person being singled out is then in the hotseat and the discomfort in their voice while they scramble to come up with an answer is palpable. It's like being put on public display.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago

blitzar 5y ago

How about "The Fatiguing Effects of In-Person Meetings"? > popular press discussion of virtual meeting fatigue (i.e.,“Zoom fatigue”), described as a feeling of being drained and lacking energy following a day of virtual meetings. I am sure I am not the only person to have felt the effects of so-called 'meeting fatigue', being drained and lacking in energy following a day of sitting in meetings in person. This piece reminds me of several 'The impact of working from home' pieces that seem to assume two states exist, working from home or doing nothing. Yes working from home has had an impact, but so did waking up at 5am and standing on a packed commuter train for 45 minutes, before wedging into an uncomfortable fluorescent cubicle for 8 hours, making sure you were 'seen', before turning around and packing into the train with the same people from the morning all over again. If you are in 'zoom meetings' back to back all day then I assume pre covid / wfh you either were in 'in-person meetings' back to back all day or have inserted a large number of additional meetings that did not exist before.

eloeffler 5y ago
True, this is often compared to the "traditional" way off physical meetings without reflecting that they can laso be seen as an alternative to something else istead of being something like the baseline. And there actually is meeting fatigue caused by often badly ventilated meeting rooms.
- lostphilosopher 5y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2019/03/21/all-that-hot-air-in-meetings-makes-us-dumber-and-the-reason-why-will-shock-you/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2019/03/21/all-that-... (just as a reference for that last point)
  - eloeffler 5y ago
    Thanks
JohnFen 5y ago
Yes, meetings are awful whether in person or remote, but for me, the remote ones are worse.

FriedrichN 5y ago

Virtual meetings are usually much shorter, so in my experience a lot less fatiguing than IRL meetings (especially if I have to drive somewhere). Long meetings, virtual or in meatspace are always fatiguing. And they're very unnecessary almost all of the time. But I prefer it when people have their camera on, that way I can tell whether or not they're engaged or not. And because of this 'being watched' effect meetings tend to be shorter.

JohnFen 5y ago
Oh, man, you're lucky! Not only are our virtual meetings no shorter than the old in-person ones, but we get to have a lot more of them, too!

liotier 5y ago

Our (large French telco) remote practice, inherited from when we switched to flex office a couple of years before COVID: almost never video but almost always screen sharing. I feel that screen sharing is a much more productive use of screen real estate !

Dumblydorr 5y ago

I personally don't get meeting fatigue, I like a bit of human interaction that isn't my partner. I moreso don't like useless meetings or feeling a meeting is unnecessary but I'm attending to keep my superiors happy.

bamboozled 5y ago

One thing I find that's different is that it's harder to do simple stuff like go to the toilet on the video call. When I used to be in a physical meeting, I'd get up and leave the room if there was a lull in conversation, it signaled I had left. On a zoom call, you could go to the toilet with your headphones or whatever, but it's harder to get a gap in conversation (there's always a speaker), and I don't like to trust mute with a poop.

emdubbelyou 5y ago
A few people on my team use virtual backgrounds that say “be right back”. You can set your background to that if you need to step away from your computer. Some add little emojis (like brewing coffee) or other things to personalize it.

cybervegan 5y ago

As an autistic person, I think this is a useful lesson for the neurotypical population on what we go through in daily life. Zoom fatigue seems to be very much like the social fatigue aspies tend to experience - where non-verbal cues are scrambled and hard to interpret to the point you spend a large amount of mental energy to try to compensate. Welcome to our world, "normies" :-).

varispeed 5y ago

We simply don't use cameras. Sometimes a person would turn it on to show something, but that's it. There is absolutely no need to be visible at all times.

jpm_sd 5y ago

At this point I only turn my camera on for 1:1 meetings. It's distracting and useless for larger groups. Even in 1:1s I hate being unable to actually make eye contact, it's consistently confusing.

karlkloss 5y ago

Now we need an investigation comparing VR meetings to flat screen meetings. I find VR meetings much better, but it highly depends on the quality of the VR goggles and the software. And of course you need some time to get used to VR.

nsmog767 5y ago

bit of a different perspective, but I simultaneously believe: a) Video is draining, like this study (and all the anecdotes in comments) attest to; b) You need video at least a majority of the time to maintain any type of human relationship with people in a remote environment. Maybe the problem isn't the video, but an abundance of meetings. Fewer meetings = less fatigue!

ubermonkey 5y ago

I have worked at home, or as a high-travel person, for almost 20 years. It started when I hung my own shingle out after the dot-com crash, and then continued into two small firms. The first one folded in 2007, but I've been with the second one since then (so, 14 years this month). Both firms had geographically diverse teams, and neither have any office space anywhere. Until about 10 years ago, I did a lot of client-facing travel. Then, all of a sudden (seemingly), that stopped. In retrospect I think it was because in-person visits for our work (implementation of our project management system with large-scale customers) really does not need it. What you need is time with us so we can help you configure, and train you, and troubleshoot with you, etc -- and that works GREAT over GoToMeeting (or WebEx or whatever you prefer). If you want us on site, you're paying for WAY more hours, plus you're paying for flights, hotels, meals, rental cars, etc. AND if we have to go to you, we can't do other work for other customers while we're in your office, which makes US less efficient, so the telepresence approach is a big win on both sides. *We have never ever ever turns on cameras* as part of this work. This was true before COVID, because they were not a value-add at all. This is especially true during COVID when so many are working with home-grade internet packages with really crappy upload speeds. The video sabotages the audio and screensharing, and brings nothing useful in return, at least for us. I'm waiting for the rest of the economy to realize this. Several of our customer parties are in organizations that have decided YOU MUST TURN ON YOUR CAMERA or whatever, and we occasionally get questions about our refusal. As vendors, though, we're in a position to just say no.

mmaunder 5y ago

I've been advocating for voice-only calls for remote teams for years. Most people think I'm nuts. Cameras are only there to try and emulate an office environment. But the effect they have on employee flexibility and meeting style is profound. Once you turn the camera on you need to dress as if you're in the office, even though you're at home. You need to design your camera background to look professional i.e. emulate the office, even though it's your home. Your partner, kids or guests don't get to walk through the room anymore without creating anxiety in you - even thought it's your home. Voice only? It's a different world. You can dress the way you'd dress at home. You can have family and friends walking by without an issue. You don't have to turn your home into some kind of stage that pretends to be an office. But voice has even greater benefits: It's lower bandwidth so you can travel more freely. You can use push to talk to mask background noise when you're on a group call. Voice also has a leveling effect among colleagues so it stops being about who is the best looking, has the nicest haircut, or the fanciest suit. It's about a purely intellectual connection with your colleagues. In that sense, voice only is a leveler and an enabler. It breaks down barriers. At Defiant (our 38 person cybersecurity company) we've been doing voice only since we started hiring. I designed our collaboration this way because I was a fone phreak in the early 1990s (hanging out on #phreak on effnet) and I collaborated with my best friends voice only and via text on IRC, in some cases for years. So I knew going into building a software company that I could make voice-only collaboration work along with text. We started hiring and going voice only in 2015, when even the idea of remote was absurd to many companies. Now, in 2021, we have the Fortune 5000 stumbling into remote work and doing their damndest to emulate the office environment. And the camera is a core part of that attempt to emulate. Not only does it have strong negatives, like the fatigue the study mentions, but it also doesn't take advantage of the benefits of voice-only and having a truly intellectual, relaxed, and collaborative environment between remote colleagues. We use Teamspeak for our big team calls with PTT enabled which is a game changer for noisy environments. And we use mostly slack calls for one on one or small groups.

JohnFen 5y ago

In my workplace, use of the camera for Zoom meetings is optional, and 100% of everyone opts not to. I think it makes things much better. Not as good as not having Zoom meetings at all, but still, it's better.