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Stop making employees turn on webcams during meetings
- joshdev 5y agoHaving worked remote before the pandemic I found having my camera on was a very good reminder to the team that I was still there. Increasing your visibility when you are one of a few remote employees is very important. All that said a camera only helps so much. There is something to be said for traveling to your office periodically to put in real face time. I’m looking forward to offices starting to open up here soon.
- eigengrau5150 5y agoNobody can make employees turn on webcams if they remember they're vertebrates and that they have the right to refuse. freedom = i won't
- xeromal 5y agoMy company doesn't require it but they strongly ask you do for clients just to be respectful. Face to a name and all that. Humans are still human.
- eigengrau5150 5y agoI am not human at work. I am but a resource. Resources do not have faces.
- xeromal 5y agoThat might be for you but that's definitely not a majority opinion
- _ph_ 5y agoOf course companies can make employees do a lot. How much, depends on the job situation on the market and the private situation of each employee. Many employees cannot afford to lose their job. They might just have bought a house, have a family which depends on their salary to survive. That is, why a lot of companies get away with "making" employees to do things. The more, the less there is protection of jobs.
- JohnFen 5y agoThat's true, but you have to remember that for some, choosing to leave the camera off is hazardous to their career or position.
- yosito 5y agoI really wish there was a way for me to share this type of article with my company without coming across as the "difficult" guy.
- dudul 5y agoThis reminds me of the time I worked at this company where IT enforced all passwords (email, laptop, AWS, etc) to be changed every month. Every time I got the prompt I would send them a study showing how this was actually making security worse. I got the HR complain after 4 times I think :)
- doanerock 5y agoI agree enforce two factors not more frequent password changes.
- peakaboo 5y agoLet me tell you something that you will have great value from in life. The cost of free will is to sometimes be difficult to understand for other people. My webcam is always off. Nobody expects me to have it on anymore. In the beginning I got a few questions about why. I said I don't like how I look on camera to other people. Nobody even tried to convince me to have it on. You are not an adult until you learn to do what you want and handle other people's opinions as exactly that - their opinions. Its what they want, not what you want. The difference is very important. Tldr... Grow balls, learn to do what you want and be OK with what other people may think. After a few days or weeks, it becomes normal for them and they can focus on other important topics like who wins the bachelor this year.
- quantified 5y agoWow, a lot of the “grow up” input I received from youth on was to stop being selfish and only thinking about my needs. And I found treating other people’s opinions as important to be really useful in being married and raising kids. Social groups must have highly variable definitions of adult behavior. However, my camera is off when I haven’t had time to take a shower, a dashing down the hall for a bio break, and many other times. When I talk with my hands too, my camera is definitely on, and I appreciate the nuance of others’ facial expressions.
- dudul 5y agoDo people who feel anxious because of a zoom camera also feel anxious during in-person meetings? I can't quite see the difference to be honest. I do occasionally keep my camera off when it would be obvious that I'm doing something else during a boring/useless meeting, but it has nothing to do with "anxiety".
- JohnFen 5y agoThere's a pretty huge difference between being on camera and being face-to-face, and yes, for a lot of people (maybe most), being on camera is more stress-inducing.
- endisneigh 5y agoDo you normally have in-person meetings at your house? You don't see the difference between going into an office and revealing your living situation?
- dudul 5y agoLike the color of your couch? I mean, OK, it's a stretch but maybe some people get really stressed about that. Most video conference programs allow you to put a fake background though.
- maffydub 5y agoAt least where I work, it's company policy that, if you have your camera on (this is optional), you either blur the background or replace it with a virtual background. Doesn't that address this concern?
- dessant 5y agoAll your reactions, manners, and living conditions can be recorded and later judged by your collegue's mother-in-law during a Zoom call. It would be a bit more difficult for her to achieve that during an in-person meeting at the office.
- dudul 5y ago
- nickdothutton 5y agoOne of the problems with the Camera-On experience is that… it’s just not very good. By good, I mean good enough to tell when someone is lying, or to tell when someone is trying to interject in that way that is easy in-person but so often ends in stepping on one-another on these conf sessions. It just doesn’t add enough.
- doanerock 5y agoI have a coworker who announces his presence by announcing his self every time he joins. It does not matter if two other people are in the middle of a conversation, once he joins a meeting he announces that " name is here" I just don't understand it.
- julianlam 5y agoIt's a holdover from the days of teleconferencing, no? When participants join, all they'd hear is a little chirp, and then invariably, someone would ask "who just joined?" Announcing themselves just seems like a time saver that is no longer necessary in the videoconference age.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- missedthecue 5y agoThe simple truth is that the in person experience cannot be replaced, hence why so many companies want to return to the office
- void_mint 5y ago> The simple truth It's not simple at all. Sure, you cannot replace an in-person experience with an online experience with no other changes. But why would you? You can't replace a car ride with a motorcycle, but you can absolutely travel effectively with a motorcycle. Thinking there's only one way to work, and if that way doesn't work in all contexts the working context is correct, is just silly.
- armchairhacker 5y agoStop having meetings which are slow, unproductive, and overall a waste of time. Plenty of stuff can be done in Slack or email. When you really need a meeting, people shouldn’t have an issue turning on their webcams. Better yet, try to make the meeting in-person. Real meetings are infrequent and important.
- version_five 5y agoAgreed. I have a 4-6 person remote team and we have daily 1/2 hour meetings that are supposed to be an active discussion. If someone was at their desk and didn't turn on their camera on, I'd find it strange. On the other hand, last year I had to go to a 20+ person "remote offsite" full of content I didn't care about delivered with very little interaction. We were told we had to keep our cameras on for that, I just pretended I didnt hear that part.
- lvs 5y agoManagement authoritarianism is the natural course of corporatism. There's not much to do about it but to work for oneself.
- aclelland 5y agoJust during meetings? Since January my office (~30 people) have needed to be on our webcams and headphones on 9-5 each day. The headphones are so people can ask you to quickly jump into a virtual meeting. While I'm not interrupted very often due to my role, it's been quite a frustrating experience.
- doanerock 5y agoI am all for getting a IM if I am needed to help some one out, but all day meeting just in case seams quite asinine.
- e40 5y agoThis is pretty silly. It takes seconds to jump into a meeting w/o being geared up already.
- aclelland 5y agoIt's supposed to make everyone feel like we're on one big 'virtual office'. Of course, it might be true that in a real office anyone can come up and chat when they feel like it, there isn't a very high chance of my kids running into a real meeting naked because they've just come out of a shower/pool. I actually took a similar stance to the person in the article and after a few weeks just moved my camera to point further and further towards a wall and just keep my hands in frame. A few grumbles but no calls from HR, yet.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JohnFen 5y agoOh, that's just awful. That would be a dealkiller for me.
- kristjansson 5y agoSeems like the same absurd misunderstanding of remote work as office-simulation that leads to those silly iPad-on-a-stick telepresence robots. Coupled with the sort of management culture I can’t imagine to be pleasant to work for
- maxxxxxx 5y ago> He added that managers, especially male managers, should turn off cameras during these times or employees will otherwise feel pressure to show their faces. What a ridiculous article. In this time of remote work, connecting is hard. Humans are not input/output devices. We need to be able to see each other in the eye. Managers, especially, should set the right example and turn their on cameras - and ask their team to do so too.
- peakaboo 5y agoNope. Nobody has the right to forcefully film other people, including your manager and your coworkers.
- patrick451 5y agoNobody is forcing. If you don't like it, find another job. But a requirement to be present in a meeting is not unreasonable, and camera on is a closer proxy to physically present than otherwise.
- peakaboo 5y agoYes it is unreasonable. Its the same as your employer installing cameras in your house to watch you.
- taylodl 5y agoRemember what we did before the lockdown? Call-in meetings? No camera. This is the same thing, really but now we can do things like share screens. My team has one meeting we ask everyone to have their camera on - the sprint review. That's every two weeks and everybody is there with cameras on. Otherwise, nearly the whole team as their cameras off during meetings.
- doanerock 5y agoWhere do I put the film? Do I need a dark room?
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
- CSDude 5y agoI don't want to open them or see others because it kills my CPU and causes throttles, and if I share screen it's like a meltdown is happening. Macbook 15 - 2018 with 6 cores and 32GB memory. On the other hand, my personal M1 Macbook does not even go past 50C on 30+ person Zoom chats. I'd still close my feed because the problem I have is too many meetings, and more than half of them are not important. But when you say, this Zoom session should have been an email/slack/document, I come across as "that" person and get shunned.
- roywashere 5y agoMe & my coworkers with 2018 Macs all have this problem in Teams. I tried to search for a solution and can only see other people complaining. I really can not understand how I can't even seem to be able to scroll in Slack sometimes when I'm in a Teams meeting, and how seemingly this is the case for so many people!
- JohnFen 5y agoThe Teams conferencing abilities are pretty seriously limited. In my workplace, we use Teams for IM purposes, and Zoom for teleconferencing.
- tomc1985 5y agoI'm in a similar boat and my MBP performs at a tiny fraction of its potential because of all the corporate security crap they've loaded on it.
- JohnFen 5y agoOne of the things that I'm very grateful for in my workplace is that using the camera is optional. And everyone opts not to use the camera.
- maxerickson 5y agoI don't even have a camera. I needed one to do some training that required it and I treated it like something borrowed and gave it back after the training.
- JohnFen 5y agoThat's actually why the camera is optional. For security reasons, none of our dev machines have cameras or microphones, providing enough friction to management that they just said "never mind".
- xutopia 5y agoStop having meetings you shouldn't be having. If your camera isn't on it's because you are listening not meeting.
- doubled112 5y agoIf my camera isn't on, it's because my work laptop is stashed on a shelf closed due to space contraints in my home office/bedroom/craft room/music room/class room combo, and frankly, I'm not ready to invite my coworkers into the bedroom I share with my wife. Don't make assumptions about other's situations just because it doesn't match yours.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoWork is more than just cranking out code. Some of us enjoy killing time with others...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- patrick451 5y agoWhat drivel. Coming out next month: Why Forcing Employees to Show Up for Work is Sexist.
- cube00 5y agoMy boss pressured us with the article "Yes, it’s rude to have your camera off during a video meeting" https://archive.is/RwiZk https://archive.is/RwiZk The first meeting they commented on the weight I put on since I was last on webcam and if I didn't want those comments I should use my webcam more often. I no longer feel any shred of guilt saying 'no' each time they ask now.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoYikes, talk about pressure to conform to an imaginary culture that is superstitiously treated as if it existed and was good to begin with.
- doanerock 5y agoI don't understand the people who refuse to never turn their camera on because they "don't like how I look on camera" I feel that is is all about reading the room. If you are in a meeting with a feel there is no need to have your camera on the whole time owhole bunch of people and you are mostly listening in I r at all. On the other hand if it is only a handfull of people say 5-6 max where you are having a discussing it is more appropriate to have a camera on.
- madrox 5y agoI can't speak to other fields that require more extrinsic motivation, but as an engineering manager, cameras are pointless for teams. It's yet another one of those performative things like making your employees show up by 8am. It's a loose correlator to performance at best. What does matter are non-transactional relationships among teams. That's what remote work has really made harder. Cameras don't make relationships more or less transactional. What makes relationships less transactional is an hour of team building. Play a few rounds of Among Us on company time...whatever the team feels like it can come together around that isn't work, which is what water cooler breaks amounted to, anyway. Regardless, if employees don't feel comfortable being seen by the team, that's a sign of deeper team problems. Simply making them turn the camera on won't fix it.
- jareklupinski 5y ago> "I was on a call with about 15 employees and [the speaker] said everyone should have their camera on because it's company policy and part of our culture now," said the woman This should probably become an interview question when screening candidates for companies that care about this sort of thing. Or at least something to mention in the job description, like "Role requires the use of audio / text only during meetings, video is forbidden" or "Role requires 5-20 hours of face time per week".
- insickness 5y agoHumans are evolved to interact with faces. Along with language and voice tone, a lot of our emotions are conveyed through facial expressions. If your coworkers and managers see your face instead of just hearing you, you're more likely to build a connection. Sure, we can argue exactly how much more of a connection it is to actually see someone's face rather than just hear them. But if you're looking to make an impact, get promoted, etc., you're going to be more memorable and seem like you're making an effort to connect if you turn your camera on.
- kristjansson 5y agoLike a lot of corporate policies, this is a reasonable sentiment made absurd by universal application and coercion. Is it nice to see coworkers? Yes, IMO. Nice enough to set a general expectation that cameras be on during meetings? Sure, I guess. Nice enough that someone that declines (explicitly or implicitly) for whatever reason should face even a hint of a resistance to that decision? Emphatically no.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]