I was on a partially-remote team for years, with bi-weekly team conference calls - webcam was possible but we all never used it, not even the manager. Screenshare was used for presentations. But audio was enough. Why is everyone defaulting to video calls for things? It adds so much "noise" and cognitive load on things.
My personal happiness plummeted, anecdotally, when my coworkers started dropping the video feed one by one. It was surprising, but noticeable and significant.
Same for me. There's just little things about interacting with a person face to face, personality aspects like how they express themselves: posture, eye movement, facial expression even. They just add to the interestingness of the work.
We do standups on video because we have a team split between the west coast of the US and Hyderabad. We get to see teammates from the other office once every couple years maybe, so we use video to maintain a personal connection. We've found it really helps us work better as a team.
So I'd say it's really situational. I'd prefer not to try and coordinate development sprints between two sub-teams offset by 12.5 hours from each other, but if I can't avoid that, then it sure helps to see faces to keep people feeling connected.
Obviously everyone will have their own personal experience. This is what worked for us.
1. Body language- it's important to be able to see people's facial expressions etc to gauge their reactions to things you're saying
2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other
3. Keeping focused- for me at least. If i'm on an audio only call i'm tempted to zone out or do some other work when other people are speaking and I miss stuff.
> 1. Body language- it's important to be able to see people's facial expressions etc to gauge their reactions to things you're saying
> 2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other
Do you find this works in practice?
I don't think your average video call setup is good enough for it to make a difference. There's no eye contact, video quality is usually questionable, etc.
If I was a professional negotiator who knew how to read body language in an academic sense, then maybe I could get some use out of video calls. But I don't think I'm able to get the "instinctual" benefits.
