The fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings
doi.apa.org
doi.apa.org
I've done full days of real meetings. Those were exhausting and very draining. I'm surprised that anybody would expect anything different from virtual meetings.
I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices.
It's less so when I've met the people IRL. I'm guessing I can then link their image or voice to the human I know.
In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.
I think you're implying causality from camera off to speaking less, but I'd bet that it's more likely the other way around. That is, people in meetings where they're pretty sure they have nothing to say don't feel they need to be seen if they're not going to be talking.
On the flipside I could argue the situation is more akin to playing a multiplayer game over VC, at least for meetings that aren't "let's stare at cameras for (half) an hour". Your virtual space is limited, so audio becomes a more favorable channel and cues on the visual side need to be a lot stronger than wishy-washy human cues to be effective (e.g. explosive sticker emotes, popup text).
I'm sure anyone who has an idea can compare this scenario to your average "look at my screen" video call.
I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either:
- Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.
- Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread.
It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
The exceptions I have for this are:
- 1:1's
- Interviews
> I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
There's an organisational issue here.
The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding.
Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide.
All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.
Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).
It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.
My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.
I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.
Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.
We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up.
Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.
Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence?
> There are exceptions of course
imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement.
Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care?
Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off
but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.
Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship.
We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face.
It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people.
The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either.
Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.
These are just digital calls that someone put poor representations of facial expressions alongside.
I never said this.
> Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
Maybe, if you have a company culture where such mistakes cannot be addressed frankly, then perhaps. The lack of facial expressions and other non-verbal cues will take away much of the signals that are available to the organizer however. Which in turn can make regular nonsense meetings last longer than they should.
In my experience quite a lot of these regular meetings are scheduled as a knee-jerk reaction of management to solve problems they don't actually understand. This is great source of unproductive meetings, bowing out 'gracefully' by turning off your camera and attention will not make things better. I'm used to being able to express my concerns openly though, without holding back, so maybe I'm biased.
Sometimes it's worthwhile for someone to be there just to make one or two important decisions in an hour long meeting.
I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background - which is also a good way to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Online meetings and turning off the camera are new, let's do what we can to take advantage of the pros they offer rather than establishing a new social norm that staring into a camera for 15 minutes and saying and doing nothing is the only polite thing to do.
I think this is necessary for me in person or online. My mind tends to wander during meetings, especially meetings that don’t specifically involve (say, group status meetings where people just read their completed items and backlogs that we all already see).
Serious question: aside from not being required to be in the same physical place at the same time, what are the pros?
If you have the camera off, I have no idea if you're listening. If we're in a regular meeting in an office I can see that you're disinterestedly looking at your cell phone and react accordingly if I really need your attention. If you're camera off in an online meeting I have to assume with every single thing that I say that you are distracted and even if I say your name I am not sure if you even heard me until I say your name and wait for your acknowledgement (e.g. you turning on your camera or saying something to the effect of 'now I'm listening because I heard my name'). Seems like this is a real drag on productivity. This can obviously be different within an actual team that has a history of working together and working together well without the need for this. I.e. if you have a team meeting and you know every word is listened to even if everyone is off camera. That's not the kind of meeting we're talking about here though I think. We're talking about cross functional meeting between people that have lots of other stuff on their plate and at least half the meeting is not interesting to them.
One of my basic policies was "no scheduled recurring meetings" (I'd think that scrum meetings count as those).
Meetings, for me, were "one-off" events, with focus on a particular, singular goal.
Of course, I worked for a Japanese company, so my policy didn't mean squat to the higher-ups. I had regularly-scheduled meetings; whether or not I wanted it. Many of these meetings were little more than "gab sessions," which was often a nice break from the grind, but had no other positive effect on the projects at hand.
Recently, on the project I'm developing, we had a problem, where the top brass allowed themselves to become complacent, and ignored my frequent status updates (I'm big on process transparency). This came to a head, one day, when they discovered that the product I was making, which had gradually reshaped to meet reality, had deviated from their original goals.
They decided on twice-weekly video meetings (usually only a half hour). This helped them to get a lot more involved. It does nothing at all, for me, but it does help me to keep the work I do "in their face."
As a result, they have changed their original goals, to meet the ground truth, and also has helped me to get important feedback from them.
The fact these meetings are short, and to the point, as well as just the two of us, helps a lot.
I could not agree more. We as a culture do meetings entirely wrong.
Reading this discussion, I start to feel the same way. People seem to use it as a coping mechanism to deal with bad meetings. Surely fixing the meetings would be a better thing.
They strongly favored actual call-in-with-a-phone phone conferencing. No video. Not even, necessarily, a computer at all.
Some places do video conferencing but have a culture of keeping cameras off. Usually this is driven from the top down.
... it is nice to have video for e.g. visual social cues of who might want to say something next, or whatever, but having cameras off is fine too.
However, having the camera off definitely saves a ton on fatigue by keeping you from feeling like you have to sit in one spot, in more-or-less one position, staring at either one particular screen or at your camera, to mime paying attention. Me, I like to pace and wander around the house when I'm on a call, even if I'm very interested in it. Hard to do that with video on.
And they work! Nobody in those orgs thinks they are the equivalent of "not showing up." How do you think bankers, lawyers and CPAs got huge deals done in the 80s and 90s, despite everyone being in different offices and often in different cities? Lots and lots of conference calls.
Video calls are a recent innovation made possible by tech. But many organizations have no functional memory of how to do calls prior to Zoom et al. And so some of them have created these bizarre sets of social norms around having to have video on to be "present", apparently unaware of the decades of doing it without video that worked extremely well with less fatigue.
Personally, I love walking around (if only just pacing) while on the phone. The physical movement makes my mind work better and allows me to better process what the other person is saying. And that's how lots of people did it prior to video.
If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit.
I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.
I can well believe it leads to more engagement on your part, for the reasons you describe. I feel the same way.
But do other people engage with your comments etc? Does your enthusiasm bring out other people.
I feel this is a blessing in most cases.
Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now.
Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.
This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.
The point isn't to come completely informed. Just enough to prepare some thoughts and questions.
If only. Bosses can really only mess things up. Leadership sets expectations, but employees as a group have to keep each other in check, and propagate the culture to new hires as they come on board, or things deflate pretty quickly.
More and more I see meetings that stop for 30s~1min because the presenter raised a point that hit us and we take a few moments to digest/double check. On the other end basic reporting meetings got a lot shorter.
Basically, if there is nothing to be said, it just ends up with that unengaging, really boring feeling. If there was any interest in the subject, time goes faster as we’re also checking a lot in the background. I kinda see the default boringness as a feature really.
An exception is the sales department which prefers to use a camera for obvious reasons. But engineers vary rarely use cameras. I don't even have one right now in my office.
I think if you know the people you are talking with, a camera isn't needed to "feel" people.
This is exactly how see online meetings. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with real people. I can't gauge people's level of attention. Conversational turn-taking feels like swimming through mud. And we don't even have the basic expectation that speaking more loudly (or softly) is perceived accurately by the listeners.
Just a deeply frustrating experience all around.
When we first moved to video due to covid I was exhausted every single day. I grew to hate video calls. But how much of this was my inexperience with the tech, my own lockdown tiredness and just the general funk of life at the time, I cannot say.
18 months later I LOVE video calls. I love the fact that I'm in my own comfy quite space, I love the fact that I can move from standing to sitting and back without distracting those on The calls. I love that I can turn my video and mic off and have a pace around or eat some food.
It is great - and yes as you say the video helps hugely.
Years ago I was working with an international team that my local team were struggling with. Each day we'd be in a phone call and I could feel the tension simmering. Then we got video going, saw we were all humans and got back in the problem, solved it and came out of the delivery good friends. I swear being able to see them and knowing they could see us changed everything about how we worked together and behaved.
I've had the opposite feeling. With cameras on, everyone looks at each other's faces for cues on when to start speaking, but the lag leads to people speaking over each other. There are a bunch of "oops, sorry" moments followed by a lot of awkward pausing while we try to climb back out of the uncanny valley.
In my experience, participation doesn't seem to be related to whether the camera is on or off. Participation is generally reduced because such meetings really only allow one person to speak at a time, and if you aren't extroverted then you have a hard time horning in to be able to speak. It also makes actual group conversation essentially impossible.
Virtual meetings work best when there's a single presenter addressing an audience. They're really awful when everyone is expected to chime in.
I I'd be WFH for two years during covid, and everyone had their cameras off, I'd go crazy. Not seeing a face for months, being stressed about the other party in a meeting not even paying attention, just speaking into a void etc.
I feel it's extremely rude to dismiss others' experiences with the damn camera on for a virtual meeting. What is up that you need someone else to have a camera pointing to their face that you can't have with their voices? For most meetings that I don't require my computer I'll even go for a short walk around the house, while bouncing ideas, raising questions and so on. I feel much more productive in the meetings I'm able to disengage from my computer and surroundings and immerse on the conversation without having to care about a camera showing my face.
Being very honest, being forced to turn my camera on is a major red flag, the fatigue is real and consumed me after a year on this, since last December I've been turning my camera off and it's been incredibly productive.
Judge as much as you want but it seems you have no empathy, worse than that, you want to force your ways of working unto others without even considering others' struggles with it.
I feel very uneasy looking at myself when talking, so I've figured out how to remove my tile and it's suddenly like a normal conversation.
There are way less social codes you have to follow when wfh and people tend to not bother as much with enforcing them.
I'm being a bit encroaching here, but I'm guessing you'd have to do as much and probably more self regulation in in-person meetings. Nobody cares where your hands are, probably no one even looks at them because you're one of many tiles. Where you're looking is not interesting because nobody knows where your camera sits related to your face. I constantly look out the window while talking. Genuinely, I've had to force eye contact on bad days in in-person meetings and everyone knew, it felt as pathetic as looking at my own face and checking if my gesturing and face ist appropriate
It's not that difficult to see that this is a very different experience than sharing an office. And I'm tired of repeating this.
I had female coworker confide to me that she didn’t like turning her camera on because it takes 40 minutes to apply her makeup every day. So she only does it for important meetings, but otherwise leaves the camera off.
If you are working remotely, does it matter? Does it matter if someone hasn't showered in a week and doesn't want to show that on camera but is still a productive worker?
I really don't get this nosiness about people's lives when you aren't sharing a common physical space.
I enjoy sometimes being able to get out of bed a bit later, not having time to do a full morning ritual before work if I can get some 30-45 min more out of my sleep, why should I have to care about all of that to show my face to colleagues on camera? Why should you judge someone that doesn't want their camera on?
So... if you don't understand someone else's reasons for doing something, you assume they aren't being honest with you?
I feel you are getting somewhere with this train of thought, so far I've replied a few people on this thread that seems to think this way and project this need of having a camera on because they don't understand how that can negatively affect others and assume people are being dishonest.
The underlying issue is thinking of other's behavior as if it it was own behavior and then determine the other person's motivates from that assumption.
If you don't understand someone else, you'll assume their reasons for a specific thing are the same as if you were doing that thing.
Example: I take more days off than I have PTO for.
Conclusion: I'm claiming to have a disability to get to have more vacation days.
Reality: I've gone six months without any kind of vacation and many of my weekends spent barely recovering from work. My disability has taken so much from me that I find it hard to justify staying alive.
When I get back to work, people ask how my vacation was.
Is it any of your business?
Going from mostly physical office to mostly work-from-home on zoom is already a massive change that gives a lot of comfort to people. I think refusing literally ANY kind of human interaction apart from sound and written text is waaaay too anti-social.
Interaction is good, interaction is fine, this is where good ideas come from. Don't become a virtual entity. Humans are real.
The big difference to presence meetings is that you send your picture into the void and don't get any social cues back, or very different ones.
You're arguing against a bit of a strawman there.
Video conferences are as if everybody were potentially constantly staring at you, but you couldn't tell if or when this was the case, and despite everybody looking at you, you couldn't even make eye-contact with anybody, share a smile etc.
If anything, video conferences are dehumanising.
This is the 3rd time I'm replying that I feel that the experience of a camera is very different than real life interactions and I like real life interactions, I'm getting really exhausted of this non-sequitur being repeated...
Smiles, frowns, nods, glazed looks, puzzled looks, surprised looks, I-want-to-say-something-but-I-can't-get-a-word-in looks, zoning out, impatience, et cetera, et cetera. There's really a lot people communicate with their faces, both consciously and unconsciously.
If I'm at an in-person meeting of 5-8 people, and 3 of them get into a longer discussion about things that are irrelevant to me, and for understanding which I don't have the background, I can zone out and nobody cares, because nobody is looking at me. Everyone is looking at the people talking.
On a video call, my zoned-out face will make the trio feel uneasy; instead of discussing their topic quickly, they'll stumble and try to "talk to the audience", or god forbid, drag everyone else into the discussion. So with forced camera on, I have to look focused while squinting at the other screen, discretely playing 2048 and pinching myself to not yawn visibly, while with camera off, I could get off my chair, stretch a little, or do something actually useful for the company.
I'll be happier with having always-on camera on long videocalls when videocalls start working like real-life meetings: not everyone is looking at everyone else all the time, and everyone can tell who's looking at them in any given moment. The way things are today, I find this constant surveillance to be mentally tormenting, and only activate my camera on the basis of courtesy: 1:1 meetings, some team meetings, meetings with an important higher-up who also has their camera on, etc.
What do you do in in-person meetings? Or supermarket visits etc.? Everything you do is way more visible in those, and I've never heard anyone complain about being surveilled in person.
It's not about the visibility, it's the psychological impact it has, having a camera pointed directly at my face 100% of the time is very different than sitting in a room, reading others' faces, attention (where are they focusing their gaze? When are they drifting off? When are they tapping their fingers on the table?).
I don't know why I hear this argument so many times, a camera on my face is a very different experience than sharing a room with others, I don't see the parallel.
The parallel does not work, I don't think it's that hard to realise that a camera pointing at your face, showing how you look at any given moment to anyone that looks at you and you can't tell if they are looking at you or not is equivalent to an in-person setting where you are aware of your surroundings much more naturally.
I really don't know how to be more explicit than this about the major differences between in-person to a virtual meeting with cameras...
You feel this way shopping in the grocery store? Where the cashier is constantly looking at you when speaking? Is your productivity lower because the other people in the store can see you?
This may not be an issue for you, but it makes some people uncomfortable. Add anxiety disorder and it's a fucking nightmare. I have no issue if I can see where people are looking.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986737
Not having a camera distracting me helps me to help the other party and give them my full concentration. This is amply reflected in the audio, just like a telephone call, and in a one-on-one call you can both just leave the mic open and have a normal conversation with all the social cues audio communication offers.
Different people have different expectations and there are probably a lot of reasons for the wide variety.
However it kinda sounds like you have a different expectation than the team you work with. Would be mindful of taking the stance that ‘everyone else is wrong’
For my company we’ve used zoom for the last 3 years, and never turn on our cameras unless there’s a specific reason.
> no one at my workplace except me
That tells you your opinion is wrong. It is not rude at all and nobody but you minds. Just say "I would prefer if" instead of claiming that something "is rude".
For the first ~12 months of the pandemic, I was working from home, using my desk in the living room because there wasn't a good spot for it anywhere else. Having my camera on would have meant having my living room in full view, often including my partner on the couch in the background. While background detection/subtraction does exist, it isn't perfect, and so that would be an intrusive view into our private area.
I've since moved to a different location, with a room to be a dedicated home office. Here, it wouldn't impose on private space to turn on the camera, because that was part of the intent behind that room. However, you as the person on the other end of the call cannot know which situation somebody is in, and so it would be rude to insist on video beyond a polite request.
Not everyone is like this. I can have a great time with people who compare inputs, see they diverge, and weigh the one that provides the most charitable view higher. This is usually my actual words, which I've been told sometimes comes with a "tone" that sends all the wrong signals. It turns out a lot of people read my usual pace--which can be way too fast at first--as anger or annoyance. When people focus on the words, it's obvious (by their own account) that I'm calm and enjoying the conversation.
It's usually a cue to take a deep breath and slow down. But it's hard to remember to do that from the start, and not everyone is willing to let the tone go once I take that control. And then the deep breath becomes part of the imagined anger/annoyance. It's made me wary of voice and video chat, and wary of people who prefer it specifically because they want to use the way people look and speak to determine what's going on in their heads rather than pay attention to their words.
I am not a streamer, but I'm likely set up like one; I've studied their methods of light and composition, and learned a lot.
I have some serious scarring from facial surgery decades past, and being able to control the light and setup has made a big difference in overcoming issues related to this; it has really helped put myself forward in the best light (pun intended). In this area of exclusively working from home, it was one worth spending effort on. I'm happy to put my (ugly) face in there, and really don't mind the virtual office.
(Fun fact my camera is "only" a Logitech StreamCam, but the lighting makes such a difference. The ability to bring up and down the meetings with a single macro button on the Streamdeck is also invaluable.)
The difference between those dollar store air pods and any condenser on the first page of Amazon search results for "condenser mic" is going to be huge, but past like $50-100 nobody will be able to notice a difference over voice chat.
I spent a little bit of my own money to make my home video setup as nice as possible. It's frustrating that coworkers are now returning to the office and the meeting room video/audio quality is still pure garbage.
Mine is a Steinberg UR22 audio interface, and a SeElectronics model X1 microphone, on the RØDE PSA1 microphone arm. As it was commented, this is overkill for my needs, but when I bought it (2015) there wasn't that much in the tier below this.
I'd likely look at Elgato's new audio interface if I was to buy again, the Steinberg is top of class but might be a bit too much for my needs. I did buy the audio part of my setup in 2015 though; a lot has happened since then.
I use NVIDIA Broadcast to process my voice (noise reduction; the microphone is crazy sensitive - and my desktop has good air cooling) for work, and Discord's built in for when I'm doing some gaming.
NVIDIA Broadcast's noise reduction is good enough to merit the GPU purchase for this feature alone - it doesn't compress your voice overly, let alone the video processing I'm also using to slightly blur the background - which is leagues ahead of e.g. Google Meet's built in feature.
I replied on the microphone Q nearby in the thread.
Below the screen: Unflattering view up my nostrils.
Above the screen: Makes me look as if I am trying to avoid eye contact.
To the side: Combination of unflattering and no eye contact.
I wish there were software that could take input from two cameras (high and low) and create a fake view of me looking directly into a camera.
https://petapixel.com/2019/07/03/apple-can-automatically-cor...
Would be nice if they had a hinge on it so that it could swivel 90 degrees out of sight when not in use.
I'm achieving largely the same with my flex mount solution, although I do have to have it to the left a bit due to my middle top monitor. I have a lot more of the monitor obscured though, but it's not that bad.
When e.g. Samsung perfects their under display cameras, we can hope for built in behind pixel cameras in regular monitors. Give it a few years!
I've got three large QHD 32"s and a 24" on top on aluminum profile. The arm comes in over the top from the intersection of the middle and left monitor, and brings the camera into the field of view of the monitor - i.e. e.g. 1/4th to 1/3rd down from the top - IN FRONT OF the monitor. This is eye level, and also gets the camera a lot closer to my face - which is great (for the StreamCam).
The camera is quite narrow profile from the front, and with my 32"s it certainly doesn't feel like it's blocking the whole display. I can then position the video of who I am speaking with just off behind / to the side of the camera, which is as good as I can get it (a big improvement).
Before I got the arm, camera was too far away, and too far up and to the left - it had to go to the side of the 24", which is centred above the middle 32", and angled inwards so I can easily look up at it. (Perfect for e.g. Windows Terminal, or Slack and such).
For this particular flex mount, I relied on getting it on to the one of the two flat hinges between the 8020 profiles that the monitors are mounted on. Mounting might be an issue without such profile, so.. improvise!
It's easy to lift the arm up after a meeting.
If I had more budget I'd maybe get another Rode PSA1, which I use for the microphone - but it's very pricey (worth it for microphone!), and the flex arm does the job nicely. USB cable is velcroed to it, very narrow profile from the front.
Edit: My profile rig has been the biggest part of my home office upgrade. All the monitors are set up with ideal angles and spacing, and stay firmly put. I also use it for sim racing, but most of the time is spent on it working. I'm blown away by how much of an upgrade it has been. 8020 profile is such a blast once you get used to it.
I've also set up some plants behind my seat for a nice atmosphere, and tech books on a small shelf; the whole rig is facing the wall behind me so that nothing ever accidentally enters the picture. Also I have static picture scenes in OBS Studio a Streamdeck key press away should I ever need to "cut" my video. Same for muting audio input, no fumbling for the on screen mute button required.
The ultimate setup would be completed with
- 43” curved 4k or 8k, not panorama
- build in color calibration
- optional monitor hood
- HiFi speakers left & right, bass at the bottom
- build in directional microphone(s)
- lamps on all sides to lighten-up face at night
- (servo-) optical zoom out, e.g. for 2 attendees
- sensor(s) that detect color temperature pointing
behind the screen and adapts screen & lamps
accordingly
- able to share parts of the screen, eg half or quarter
- works with all OS-es: mac, linux & windows
- build-in bluetooth hub for keyboard, mouse & headset
- 3.5mm headset jack in multiple locations,
e.g. left, middle & right
- input for studio quality microphone
- support for attaching 2 or 3 computers
- USB-C Power Delivery up to 240Watt each simultaneous
- 10Gbit network switch to USB-C for each simultaneous
- switch all inputs & outputs in one-go,
without plug-and-play events at each switch
- able to swivel and adjust height
- mechanical switch to turn off camera & microphones
- lasts 20 years
You can probably luck out with cheaper ones, but be mindful that there's a big difference in quality between them.
Here's one I watched when researching mine (I have key light and key light air, not the ring). https://youtu.be/Q4xiJ37k9nk
I really like the StreamCam so far, and I would say it's probably the best camera on the market right now for all-purpose video usage (not quite as expensive as the top tier, but 95% of the way there in quality; better looking than the C920/30 webcams you see around a lot of offices).
Ditto on lighting though. I don't use any kind of video-specific lighting, but just putting more lamps on my desk has made a world of difference. And I think the backlighting effect also makes my monitors less stressful on my eyes.
I'm kind of comparing that part of the setup to what pro youtubers use. I don't have the budget for a proper mirrorless though, and it'd be largely wasted on e.g. Google Meet's compression algos - bearing in mind I don't stream public or make youtube videos.
The narrow front profile of the Streamcam was a nice bonus when I just put it on my new Flex arm. I'm super impressed by how well this works, getting the camera eye level in front of my 32"s. Have gone 15 months without one, kicking myself now that I didn't do it earlier - just didn't think of it.
I will have the Elgatos on low/warm setting in between meetings. They're really nice.
I just wish there was an easier way to preview my perceived stream quality over Zoom from a teammate's perspective -- the preview I get in Zoom seems a little bit too perfect to be compressed.
Very grateful I work for the former.
I totally understand drifting off in meetings especially virtual ones.
Yes, inferring bad motives to other people is bad. We should try to be charitable.
>> They might judge you and believe the reason you're not on camera is because you're busy doing something else.
Sounds like these people ^^^ are the ones who need to hear that message.
If they believe that it's on their side, so the reason to keep my camera on is to "show" that I've been paying attention? I work with a bunch of people who leave their camera on and are completely inattentive for parts of meetings, doing something else while looking at the computer. How is that different?
It's not, no one has said it is. Being inattentive is bad no matter how it's done.
My brother works in accounting and my father works in engineering. They rarely have their cameras on. I believe this stems from the fact that pre-COVID, they dealt with many things via telephone conference call. Everyone dialed in via a phone.
When the pandemic hit, they simply brought their phone conference tendencies over to Zoom. Nobody sees it as a problem because prior to COVID, video wouldn't have even been an option.
Helps a great deal to have all (audio+video+text) to follow a conversation
Secondly, I think virtual meetings are fatiguing also because of the constant staring at the screen. In in-person meetings, you spend a lot of time not looking at a screen, whereas you are constantly staring at a screen in a virtual meeting. Something that helps me is to take some of the meetings like 1:1s while walking with only audio.
I agree with the corollary at least. If someone hasn't spoken for the last 5 minutes, they are not a key participant and can turn off their camera.
The optimal middle path is probably that people sometimes have their cameras on, and sometimes don't. This option seems to get the least amount of consideration.
You do have written support to guide the meeting, right ? Won’t you all be looking at that document, eventually taking notes, and not looking at the speaker ?
Even when some people turn the camera on, I can’t imagine anyone in the meeting seeing more than their small tile in the corner while the main doc is front and center covering 90% of the window.
I used to also take a lunch break, now I eat at my desk during meetings.
It isn’t. It's an opinion, and in my opinion, a bad one that isn't justified by anything.
At my company we only use them if necessary, and I’ve been with them for over 3 years working remotely. We get work done quite well.
edit: update wording for clarity
Unfortunately a new manager insists that everyone should have cameras switched on for "human connection" and so that people feel more integrated.
It’s possible, I’d guess likely, that you’ve been able to get work done well in spite of no cameras.
Of course, I doubt anyone would do an experiment to see if your statement is true or not.
I just thought that your statement seemed so absolute but the evidence you present isn’t.
We're not getting work done "in spite of" no cameras. We're getting work done, period, and don't have to deal with the fatigue of having a webcam on all the time.
But I disagree with you because I think they are important and useful.
Combining them into a single statement with an and is what makes the disagreement.
Perhaps you could get even more work done with cameras on when communicating with people.
Just feeling fatigue doesn’t seem like a reason to turn off cameras. I feel fatigue from working, yet I do it.
So they aren’t necessary, except when they are?
Webcams do have uses but they're not necessary nearly most of the time. The few exceptions we've had are for pointing a webcam at a whiteboard and for presenting a meeting to some higherups in the airforce.
When meetings are 1-1, or maybe < 5, then they make sense, but I don't really feel the need for them otherwise.
I also don't find cameras necessary, but me and some other people I know find that long 1-1 meetings with the camera turned off feels like a prolonged phone call, which is extremely tiring for people who also dislike long phone calls.
Short camera-less meetings with quick, focused, telephone-like discussions are perfectly fine, of course. But if one of the parties has to keep going into a computer type a bunch of stuff in-between all the time, it suddenly feels like I'm trying to cancel my cable or newspaper subscription.
It's better to have notes and do it later, or at lest share the screen, rather than only using 5 minutes out of 30 for actual talking.
I found that some people who use Discord audio chats are used to having calls like that, but I'd check with the other person if they're ok before.
What about seeing a face makes it less tiring than not seeing a face? Is this possibly an introvert vs extrovert thing?
But generally virtual meetings are easy but that doesn't mean they are cheap. Where in person meetings were hard you knew they were expensive and had a kind of built in value of worth. Virtual meetings are easier but the costs are more hidden.
If the person operating a computer is doing stuff related to the meeting, time seem normal for them. But the person waiting has to remain focused to answer follow-up questions, so multitasking might not be a possibility.
Seeing a face helps in my experience, but I have no idea why. However, screen sharing is probably better. Or just not having long interruptions.
My 1-1's are almost always to discuss or troubleshooting something, so not much "downtime" at all. When troubleshooting, screen sharing is almost always used, otherwise I probably don't need the other person at all.
Idk why it works but I find it smoothing and allows me to control how I am being seen. Just my personal experience.
Doesn't need to be a constant thing, but more like glancing in the rear view mirror while driving. It's there when you need it, also there when you just want to check, but not going to keep you from the task at hand.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rearview-handy-mirror-camera/i...
MS Teams has had this for a long time.
Some people failed to notice, but for those who did it was a bit like uncanny valley.
I had one particularly bad manager who treated meetings like coffee brakes, anything we said or did was forgotten as soon as he stepped out of the room. There has been research done on this portal effect and how it makes us forget our current task.
Also note that while audio is physically 3D, we are only good at distinguishing on a 2D plane. Basically, you easily get left/right, and you kinda get near/far, but you don't get up/down. Not unless you cock your head.
But I do agree that turning on camera constantly is tiring thing. I thought turning off the camera in the meeting can be considered rude but now I've changed my mind. I wish there were a middle ground for having a language cue in the conversation while the camera is off.
The fatigue comes in several forms: physical, experiential, psychological.
Physical as in the act of being seating in poor posture, for long hours at a time and how this makes us feel.
Experiential as in the act of seeing someone on a laptop screen as we are hunched over, they are dithered and the lighting is poor and they sound (their mic + my laptop speakers) muddied and unreal.
Psychological as trust, empathy, rapport is founded on presence and connectivity, being able to communicate using gestures, body language, expressions... and how these are all muted or eradicated by the above two.
It is addressable but it doesn't come for free.
The article tested camera on vs camera off, but not the quality of the experience offered by camera on. Similarly the quality of the experience offered by the audio feels to be even more important than that of the video. To continue their experiment to an extreme... meetings where both the video and audio off wouldn't be fatiguing at all :D
To address my experiential side I started with a good microphone, then a better camera, then better (more neutral) speakers. Lighting and positioning of the desk to improve my health as well as how natural I look. For the physical a sit stand desk that I actually do use multiple times per day, and some Birkenstocks help too - I stand for about 1/3 of meetings, and I always keep a bottle of water on the desk.
I'm in an engineering leadership role and it's not unusual for me to do 6+ hours of meetings in any given day.
At the start of the pandemic I had a lot of exhaustion from such meetings, but where I am now having overhauled my setup and my thinking about it is very different and I find that I really do feel connected and restored through seeing people (I'm more an introvert, and this form now feels like being an extrovert... it's a form of meeting people that I can do).
As with anything, seek to understand the fatigue, seek to see how you can overcome it. It doesn't need a big shopping spree, I tweaked one thing every month or two until it all fell into place.
My new place doesn’t say anything about cameras but most people seem to go for camera on - but their policy (which was agreed upon by the team and is written down, which is great when you’re a new starter trying to work out the culture) is that they’d rather more people were invited to the meeting than fewer (so people don’t miss out on potentially relevant topics), but if you don’t think it’s relevant you’re under no obligation to attend and if it’s only somewhat relevant, you should feel free to get on with some other work or whatever. This seems to work pretty well in practice as there’s no “shame” to having your camera on and clearly be looking at another screen if the topic isn’t relevant, while still having the benefit of keeping your camera on if you are happy to.
Guess what the response was of the managerial class: alright, so to have a TRUE 1 hour meeting, I just schedule 75 mins?
Way to miss the point. In my view, the costs of sending a meeting invite is just too low. There is no barrier at all to start useless and inefficient meetings whilst the human and productivity cost is enormous.
Of course, this puts stronger emphasis on audible cues. You may not realize it, but people can hear you smile. This is a bit anecdotal: People on the ASD spectrum may perform better on just auditory stimuli versus audio-visual integration.
There's certainly a trade-off here, some people may strongly prefer having cameras on or off, but I feel that keeping cameras on is mostly just a default that is followed. Turning cameras off should at least be attempted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookism#:~:text=Lookism%20is%2....
It's got better now days but at the start of the pandemic every other video call with over n people would have interruptions/digressions when someone's dog/cat/kid walked into the background of someone's video.
Not only to tell when I’m muted and speaking, but when I’m about to speak or am confused.
It also shows when I’m bored and distracted. I’d rather the others know I’m distracted than not know and assume they have my attention.
The way I think about it is imagining live meetings where people have boxes over their heads. For me, it’s not a question about wanting to have my camera on, it’s about professional conduct. I mean, I don’t want to go to work either, but I do.
The whole idea of having a virtual meeting is to interact with people, the alternative is called a voice call or telephone conference.
Virtual meetings are fatiguing, but they aren't nearly as fatiguing as the pre-COVID alternatives: flying in to some different EU capital once every week and staying in hotels. So I'm pretty happy with the way travel has moved to virtual meetings, it saves me at least two days every week besides the irritation of being on the move all the time.
If you can't be bothered to have your camera on in meetings then you probably shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place. There is nothing more annoying than to have an in-person meeting from the past devolve into staring at a wall of stills or icons and then to figure out who says what and to keep a conversation going. Virtual meetings aren't perfect, but if you put some time and effort in they can be an efficiency improvement over real ones.
Next time you are in a conversation about remote work, see if you notice this: the only people who speak up are the ones who say "I can't wait to go to the office". The rest smile and nod. And yet online polls show a very different picture.
Interviews, granted, getting to know a person it’s good to see a face.
For most meetings a voice call is sufficient, for those meetings where a voice call is not sufficient you probably want an in-person meeting with a whiteboard anyway
Otherwise Agreed. And, for what it's worth, many of those whiteboard meetings can now also be conducted remotely (I humbly submit our app, ShareTheBoard, as an example solution).
So I never turn on my camera, and neither do many other people in the team, and everything is fine.
I don't understand how this could possibly be justified. We used to have conference calls all the time, they did seem to work so we kept having them... it's just that everyone has cameras now.
I don't understand why some people feel the need to harass people to turn their cameras on. Is there some kind of business reason why the cameras need to be turned on? Or is it just preference?
> There is nothing more annoying than to have an in-person meeting from the past devolve into staring at a wall of stills or icons and then to figure out who says what and to keep a conversation going.
That's an interesting experience, I wonder why that's happening to your team. This does not match my experience with voice-only calls.
There are valid reasons to ask people to turn their cameras on, and there are reasonable policies for using cameras in meetings, but it doesn't seem to me that an "always use cameras" or "never use cameras" policy is going to work as well as a more flexible policy.
Even interviews--I've done interviews both over voice and with a camera, and I've never felt like the camera gave me some significant benefit... either as interviewer or candidate. There are definitely exceptions, like for people who are partially deaf, but in general it's better to be flexible. People have different preferences and the interaction tends to go more smoothly if you're not a stickler for keeping your camera one way or another.
In that respect, conference calls did not work, and cameras are important.
There are, of course, exceptions. Just like some companies are 100% remote with video calls, people also did 100% remote work with phone conferencing and snail mail, prior to the internet.
That's a very black and white view. We (also relatively small company) take a much more flexible route. Some meetings, use a camera, like when you're presenting something to a group it adds to the story to see facial expression etc. Lots of other meetings use voice only, similar to how you just call someone when you have a question. Adding video doesn't change the answer and puts restrictions on participants to sit still in front of a camera while voice only can be done with a headset walking around.
It seems pretty common for a bystander to make a few key decisions and rare points in a meeting, and yes, their time is valuable, but not as valuable as the 6 other people in the meeting.
Think product owner and developers. Product owner isn't involved while developers dive into the weeds, but an occasional clarification from the product owner saves everyone time. And the product owner can hardly consider their own time more valuable than the collective time of 6 developers who are creating the actual deliverable.
This policy is cruel and needlessly authoritative. I work in a highly international context and have learned that both culturally and individually, people have different comfort levels regarding expressing themselves. Some are fine with cameras on, some prefer voice only. Some are so introverted that they prefer chat, and some are even only comfortable with private chat.
"If you can't be bothered to have your camera on in meetings then you probably shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place."
Good, stop inviting me then, I'd imagine a response might be. I personally have about 3 voice-only meetings per day, but I guess according to your view, I shouldn't bother at all. I successfully lead a team of 12 this way, located across the globe. People can do whatever they want (camera, audio, chat), and it works fine. Your all or nothing view seems a dramatized personal preference, and nothing else.
"and then to figure out who says what"
I don't know what software you use but both in Zoom and Teams you can see who speaks. I would also assume that if your team is so small that you recognize voices.
"and to keep a conversation going"
If you need to keep a conversation going, you may want to rethink the point of the meeting.
Wow, the whole team gets to see my unsmiling face staring at a screen for hours, what a productivity boost. Absolute bunk, you should be looking at the screen-share anyway.
Also I recommend you forgive yourself/others for getting distracted. If you were getting coffee together, you'd frequently get distracted by the surroundings and ask the person to repeat themselves. It's not like you're in a therapy session where you have to pay deep, undivided, focused, uninterrupted attention on one person over an hour. That's really hard.
More than the camera bad audio quality it much more exhausting for me. Especially when project Partners are from other countries. Reverb, sub par microphone and a foreign accent is hard for me to compensate. Really wish everybody would invest in a decent lav mike and some acoustic treatment of hard walls.
We used to have a shortage of meeting rooms when having them physically and locally. This was great as it meant they naturally spread out over the week. Nowadays folk think they can get you to hop on a virtual meeting room in minutes regardless of what you’re doing.
I’m very good at declining meetings where I think I’ll not be offering much value giving a reason why. I find quite often people want me in because they think I’ll enjoy it, or don’t want me out of the loop. They can summarise after by email if that’s all they want.
I sometimes get the feeling that, for some people, not having to write that (or any) email is the whole point of having people in meetings.
Which can lead to some annoying problems where, for example, you might have several meetings where people harangue you for wanting things done in way X but then find out after you've spent two weeks doing things in way Y that they actually conceded on way X after those things but no-one bothered to write it down or communicate it in any way.
(Not that this was a one-off; the whole company had a culture of meetings without notes or any kind of documentation.)
Having worked both in a remote and office setting, i much prefer the latter as it makes for better relations and getting to know people.
I guess remote work is just not for everyone.
I turn my camera on for _every_ meeting. Not for me, but for my coworkers, and especially the PHBs that maybe would prefer remote-work to be over.
I've given presentations to entire grids of black boxes, and it's shockingly disheartening.
I had meetings were I wished we had camera on because nobody was paying attention and I know that things would have been different with cameras or IRL.
For the most part I don’t enable my camera, unless I’m going to speak in which case i turn it on once for the duration of my speech
99% of meetings that we have, somebody is sharing their screen to show a slide deck or an agenda or to walk through and troubleshoot something.
But in the long run the answer is fewer meetings. If you’re finding ways to make your meeting load less unbearable, something else is wrong.
But if you don't like it, you have to decide if it's worth the discomfort to get that advantage.
The way it works is... You make a decision like that, people will ask you why. You explain it by saying you don't want to be on camera a few times. After a while it becomes normal and nobody ever asks again. It's very simple.