I prefer either being in-office or being completely isolated and having complete freedom if working from home. Working from home and having to work by a schedule and do daily video calls feels like taking the bad parts of both options.
I'm French and I never did video calls, ever. It's always audio calls using Teams and we just show the relevant part of the screen to the audience (aka Screen sharing or something).
Is there something I'm missing?
I really disagree, but people want everyone on camera.
At my San Francisco based fintech, the culture that's developed is:
For one-on-ones and small meetings where everybody is expected to participate, cameras are on.
For large one to many broadcasts (like an all hands) generally people turn the camera off.
But I would say probably 95% my meetings have cameras on, so I'm constantly "seeing people".
I've seen companies that dealt with a ton of business travel before WFH got big, prefer actual dial-in-on-a-phone conference calls for meetings, even when all parties happened to be in offices at the time, well into the Zoom era. It weirded me out at first, but I think they may be on to something. If you don't need to screen share, not every call needs to be a video call. Don't need to install anything—anyone with a phone, which is everyone, can join. Easier to join on-the-go. Reliable Internet connection not required. If your phone has signal, you can join the call. Can even join from a wired desk phone.
Other companies, every call's a video call and you'll catch shit if you keep your camera off. Remote cultures exist on a spectrum between those. (and, of course, open source projects with distributed teams are often highly productive with little more than IRC, email, git, and an issue tracker)
It seemed to start because managers who weren’t used to remote wanted to keep tabs on their employees.
I work in the US for a company that doesn't allow WFH.
All of our meetings are via video calls, even though we are all in the same place. This has been the norm in my experience for over a decade now.
The place I worked before my current employer did the same, but allowed people to keep the video off if they chose. Everyone chose to keep the cameras off, except most of the management.