Lessons Learned from 4,160 Zooms
The Zoom drama I want to dig into in this essay is: cameras on or cameras off?
I study and teach culture for a living. Culture is the combination of our patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior. Most of us feel surprised, judgmental, and even disrespected when our colleagues engage in patterns different than our own.
- “Of course you should have your camera on – that’s common decency!”
- “Of course you don’t need your camera on – you know what I look like already!”
Here’s what I’ve experienced across roughly four thousand Zoom meetings, in hopes that it helps you recalibrate your relationship to your own Zoom life:
Early in the pandemic I learned, through my close friends who are peppered across a wide variety of industries, that norms around Zoom behavior were developing fairly quickly. In some industries, there was a norm of logging in to a Zoom first thing every morning, receiving briefings, and no one had their camera on. In other industries, there was a spoken (or unspoken) expectation that phone would never be used ever again – video calls from here on out forever.
But here’s the thing. People connect, and feel connected, through all sorts of different mediums of communication. Some friend groups I know trade voice notes. Others FaceTime. Many trade memes. And group text threads each develop their own subculture. Some of us talk on the phone. Some of us send emails. Others write old school letters.
Here me when I say – truly – none of these mediums is magically “better” than any of the others.
I’d like to offer some Zoom protocols I think could help based on my noticings these past four years:
- I get the sense that Black people are tired of “performing” for white people. Us whites have lost the privilege (and never really earned it in the first place) of seeing into households and commenting on other people’s hair and outfits. Cameras off.
- Women in my experience (exponentially more than men), begin a startling proportion of Zooms by apologizing for something related to their appearance or the state of their background. Please stop doing that. You’re brilliant. Your roots showing have nothing to do with your worth at work. Cameras off.
- Depending on the content of the meeting, I’ve learned that being in my body can help. For example, unloading the dishwasher, folding clothes, driving, being on a walk – I have discovered that all of these things can actually help me engage in a conversation more deeply. Cameras off.
- If we’re meeting for the very first time, it can be nice to make a face and voice connection. Cameras on.
- If I’m wanting to share or receive visual cues of some sort (for example – looking at a budget spreadsheet together) it can be nice to be on video and working live in the same document together. Cameras on.
- If someone on our team is hard of hearing or multilingual, it can improve accessibility if folks can view facial expressions and body language and secondary cues to share meaning. Cameras on.
You get the point. Switch it up. There is not one hard and fast right or best way to meet. In my opinion, showing respect means meaningfully participating in the group conversation. That could be via chat. Via voice. Via document sharing. It all “counts.”
Just because someone was on camera doesn’t mean they added anything particularly useful to the meeting. Just because someone was off camera doesn’t mean they were absent from the conversation.
Stop policing what other adults choose to do from one meeting to the next. Don’t do them, do you. If you want to be on camera, do it. If you don’t want to be on camera, do that. If you’d like to ask your colleagues when you can see their face, go ahead. Don’t assume. Don’t judge. And don’t read into everyone else’s on and off camera behavior.
For the past four years it has been the equivalent of being in a meeting while also staring into a mirror. It’s wild. Give people a break. And remember that you can do uncomfortable things without dying – talking in a Zoom to someone not on camera won’t kill you. I promise. I do it every day.
If you’d like support around this or any of the other topics I’ve shared in my essays, I’ve got a handful of coaching slots open at the moment. Feel free to reach out!
My commitment to you, is that next week I will share Essay #12 out of 52 about immigration and the American workplace.
Yours,