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 environmen

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.