Why you should always turn your video on in meetings
If you’re anything like me, you keep your video on for [almost] 100% of meetings.
If you aren’t like me, then keep reading; this piece is specifically targeted at changing your mind.
In the spirit of (at least pretending to) having a balanced argument, here are the 3 arguments against keeping your video on in meetings:
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s focus on why you SHOULD keep your video on during meetings.
People are social animals. A significant portion of the information we get from each other are visual cues.
Without having all the information handy, we’re prone to make the wrong decision.
In a business environment, people are still social animals.
If you turn off your video during a meeting, you are filtering out important visual cues, which can lead you to make the wrong decision.
Just because video is a newly adopted technology and conference calls used to be ‘good enough’, doesn’t mean you should choose to actively filter out the new information that is at your disposal.
To illustrate this point using a silly analogy, let’s visit Illustratia shortly after email was invented.
In Illustratia, prior to email the Illustrations always used the telegraph to conduct business. This seemed to work just fine as every communication was short and sweet, making it easy on both the writer and recipient of the message.
In their opinion, this made conversation straight forward and to the point:
When email was invented, many Illustrations pushed back against the technology, citing it took much more effort than the telegraph and wasn’t worth the bother.
What the Illustrations didn’t realize was that the telegraph filtered out tone and intent. What seemed on the surface to be a very convenient technology didn’t support the rich conversation that email allowed for.
Once they realized how much room for misinterpretation there was using their previous technology, they knew they could never go back:
While comparing the telegraph/ email to voice/ video may seem a stretch, it isn’t a huge leap. Ultimately what the video adds is a net new layer of context to our conversation, that we don’t get with strictly audio.
So why are we so quick to click the ‘video off’ option while we’re in a meeting with our colleagues?
The introduction of video meetings is allowing us all to have much richer long-distance conversations than we had in the past.
Keeping your video on may be more tiring, but it means you’re having more productive meetings. There are certainly some exceptions, but operating under the assumption that “I want this to be as productive a meeting as possible” should be your default.
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