The Importance of Letting People See Your Face When Working Remotely

Most of my work is done from the comfort of a home office. The home office is a mixed bag of convenience and distractions, the details of which have been written about time and time again, so I won't bother going into that detail here. I will, however, dig a little bit into one aspect, and that is the use of video during collaborative calls, and why it is generally to your advantage to let the tape roll.

Let's start with laying some groundwork. Those who have been working remotely for some time know that there is an element missing when you are not physically in the office. That usually starts to make itself apparent after a few weeks or months - you miss out on the water cooler talk, the informal conversations in the hall, the distinct separation of work and home life, etc. There is a sense of having to work harder just to make your presence and contributions known to your coworkers when you are unseen. There is a fear of being on the wrong end of the 'Out of sight, out of mind' equation when working remotely.

So, when we have a conference call or meeting with coworkers or customers, that is one of the few opportunities we have to make a visual impact on our audience. And yet, what do most people do? Stop the video feed. It's less intimidating to have a nice, vaguely professional picture of yourself on the screen vs putting your mug up for everyone to see - especially if you are the only one doing so. We seem to think it's more professional to show a still image of ourselves, vs a live image where there might be some clutter in the background. It logically makes a degree of sense - we want to put our best foot forward and portray professionalism.

But the truth is - people generally don't care all that much, if at all, so long as you meet a minimum standard and don't cross the NSFW line. Additionally, sometimes showing a degree of humanity can be beneficial, as well.

So, why is it important that we show our faces? Two primary reasons - It holds us accountable to be present and listen, and the other people feel heard.

It Holds us Accountable to be Present and Listen

I'll come right out and say it - no one is a perfect listener. We start listening to the story in our head, instead of what the speaker is saying. We get distracted if we see or hear a notification on our phone while we are on a call. We start solving a problem being discussed while the person with the issue is still describing the problem. These are all natural tendencies, and everyone has experienced them.

But this also means people are understanding when it happens, if you are honest with them. "Sorry, I got distracted there for a few moments, can you repeat that last bit?", or

"Sorry, I was following an internal thought thread while you were speaking, and realized that I wasn't fully listening to you. Can you repeat that?"

If you've seen Brene Brown's TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability (one of the most viewed TED talks of all time), you know how powerful this act of letting down your guard can be.

In the end, the difference between a good listener and a poor listener is that the good listener is able to recognize when they have gotten distracted or become disengaged, and have mechanisms to bring themselves back to the conversation. Having a live video feed is one such mechanism. Knowing you are going to be seen by others allows you to go through the mental process required to be present for the upcoming conversation, and give it the attention it requires. Afterall, if it made it on to your calendar in the first place, you decided it was worth your attention.

The Other Person Feels Heard

According to research by Oscar Trimboli, the most common frustration people report is that their audience stops listening. A portion of what we communicate is the words we use, but a significantly larger portion of what we communicate is through our body language. If we are speaking with someone who is walking away from us, that's not the same as someone who is sitting across from us, giving us their undivided attention. If all the other person sees is a still image, they have no idea whether we are actually listening to them, or doing the dishes in the background while on mute. If the other person can see that you are intently listening to them, you are being empathetic, and that person will feel heard, as opposed to feeling like they wasted their time.

As a datacenter engineer, a critical aspect of my job is working with customers and understanding their concerns or frustrations, and being their advocate. A manager has to work with the range of personalities present on their team, and keep everyone engaged and going in the same direction. A salesperson who can normally depend on a lunch meeting with a customer to discuss an issue or a solution may be relegated to a video conference call instead. Regardless of the position you hold, there is someone on the other end of the videoconference who appreciates it when they know you are giving them direct and undivided attention.

So, in wrapping this up - as of the time of this blog post, most people are working from home due to Covid, and have been for some time. I anticipate that this pandemic has opened the floodgates for a WFH culture to extend into the future. Part of the challenge that comes with a WFH culture is feeling that your work ethic and contributions are up to snuff, as compared to the standard of physically going into a workplace. If you have a mechanism that allows you to demonstrate to your colleagues that you are present during conversations with them, it is to your benefit to leverage that mechanism as much as possible.

On the other side of the coin, there are certainly times when portrayed professionalism is paramount. C-level execs engaging in major corporate events that are now virtual, interviews, award presentations, etc - those are instances where it is absolutely necessary to display polished professionalism. In these situations, prior to rolling the camera, the person gets dressed up, cleans up the background of their office a bit, and other such touches. Yet, notice that they are still on live video - because it matters.

The Pros and Cons of a Pros/Cons List

Every day we are faced with making a lot of decisions, and most of these decisions are relatively inconsequential - meaning that if we don't make the optimum choice, we have opportunities to course correct, or the resulting negative outcome doesn't significantly alter our lives. However, there are some occasions where we have to make a major decision, and the potential outcomes are large and have obvious implications down the road. Such examples might be deciding which of two potential houses to purchase, what type of vehicle to purchase to replace an old one, or even something like whether to bother investing in putting solar panels on your roof.

A very common practice to help assist with making these decisions is to create a pros and cons list. By brainstorming a bunch of factors and writing them down, we are supposedly then in a better position to determine the best course of action.

There are certainly benefits to a pros and cons list, and they are a helpful tool - but like all analytical tools, they don't capture the entire story. So I wanted to take a few minutes to explore some of the detractors inherent in a pros and cons list, because if we can be cognitively aware of them, we can take steps to mitigate their effect.

• Lack of Magnitude

In my view, the primary downside to a pros/cons list is the lack of magnitude of each item. If we are faced with a decision and come up with five pros and three cons for option A, and four pros and three cons for option B, it's really easy to get caught up in the numbers and think that option A is best. Yet, if the cons for A are really concerning to us, we may be better off going with option B, which may have fewer pros, but also a different set of cons that we are not as concerned about.

I think that most people, by the time they reach general adulthood, have recognized, in some way, this particular issue of a pros and cons list. What I find interesting is that this one issue branches into a couple other more subtle issues, such as:

• Lack of Probability

A pro's and con's list tends to generate a list of factors that appear to be binary - they either happen, or they don't, and each outcome is essentially given equal probability. Yet life is generally not binary like that. If a list of con's has five items, some of those cons could be stretches, while others are almost guaranteed. The format of a pros and cons list makes it difficult to evaluate relative probabilities of the various potential outcomes.

• Amplification of Biases

This is probably the most subtle impact of a pros and cons list. When we are coming up with our list of factors, it's nearly impossible to eliminate the impact of our own bias. This can range from intentionally not including certain factors in the list because we don't want to consider them, to adding extra, almost trivial, items to the pros side because we have already made a gut decision and are looking to us a pros and cons list as an objective validation of what we want.

So, if a pros and cons list is still a useful tool, how do we go about making the best decision, when the tool has these negatives associated with it? Dampen the bias by game playing all the decisions out, and go with the option that yields the best probability of a favorable outcome. Note that this does not eliminate the possibility of a bad outcome, but it does minimize it.

Here's an example: if you are playing poker, and you are going into the river with a pocket Ace and 4 of hearts, the flop showed a 2, 3 and 5 of hearts - you have a straight flush, and chances are you are going to win that hand. Sure, an opponent may have a higher ranking straight flush, but the chances of that are extremely low. So 99 times out of 100, you are best off raising the pot by a large amount to capitalize on your strong hand.

In IT, I see this sort of thing play out a LOT. With virtually every engagement, there are knowns, unknowns, and risks. Each one affords the opportunity to say 'If we go this direction, this could happen; if we go that direction, that could happen'. After 20 years, I've learned that one cannot just simply list potential outcomes and go with the one that seems to have the largest number of benefits. Too many times, that has led to immediate progress, only to be stymied on the back-end by large amount of troubleshooting (at best), or unexpected downtime (at worst), because something wasn't fully thought through.

Disclaimer: Information in this post is derived partially from my own experience, and partially from information obtained from Annie Duke, about how to make better decisions.