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.

 

Flow States to Improve Performance

In a previous post, I wrote about the stress cycle and how to avoid burnout. In this post, I wanted to talk about flow state, which I think of as the opposite side of the same coin.

For the sake of giving credit where it is due, most of the information herein is what I got from an interview I heard with Steven Kotler.

So, what is a flow state? It's a cognitive state where a person is fully immersed and focused. It's characterized by rapt attention so deep that a sense of time is lost. Some people refer to it as being 'in the zone', or having a runners high.

Most people have had some degree of experience with this. Those days in the office where, at the end of the day, you felt incredibly productive and satisfied? You were probably in a flow state. What I found fascinating about the interview was that Steven discussed the neurobiology of flow, what happens during flow, and even discussed triggers and ways we can get into it.

To lay the groundwork, the first thing to mention is that brainwaves are different during a flow state vs normal consciousness. There are four primary types of brainwaves:

• Beta: Normal mental state
• High Beta: A bit faster than beta. Typically seen when anxious
• Alpha: When the brain is at rest, and there is little resistance between ideas. Daydreaming
• Theta: Mostly when in REM sleep. No resistance between ideas.

So, starting from a known, normal position - we typically spend a large portion of our waking hours in beta, where we are fully conscious of time, our sense of self, and what is going on around us. The conscious mind is very fast and powerful, but it does have limitations - it can only hold on to a handful of threads at a time, and has limited RAM, so to speak.

When in flow, the brain processes in alpha waves, and we get a sense of time dilation and a sense of one-ness with the activity we are engaging in. The reason is because there are two changes that occur in the brain during a meditative state such as flow - portions of the prefrontal cortex (where our sense of time is) shut down, and the right frontal lobe (where we get our sense of self) deactivates.

In addition to the brainwave shift, the other thing is that flow results in the dumping of the most potent neurochemicals - dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins. All these chemicals are what allows for increased data acquisition abilities and creativity spikes.

A flow state has four primary phases that one has to move through:

• Struggle: This is either something quickly induced by something like a fight or flight response, or a long building time to spool up. During this phase, the prefrontal cortex is very active, various stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) build up, and the brain is in beta and high beta.
• Release: This is a distraction where you get your mind off the topic at hand. This is the phase where the brain shifts from beta to alpha. However, not all distractions are created equal - TV and social media are terrible, because they keep your brain in beta. Physical movement (running, walking - something repetitive where you can allow your attention to wander a bit) is a common practice to move into this phase.
• Flow: Where you are trying to get!
• Recovery: After the neurochemical dump, a recovery period is needed.

As I mentioned before, most people have had the experience of being in a flow state at some point. It's highly addictive - having a natural high induced by massive amounts of neurochemicals that are far more powerful than any synthetic version will do that.

So, then, how do we get into flow?

At its core, flow only happens when we are fully immersed in the present moment. This does take effort (see 'Struggle' phase above), but there are things we can do help us focus:

• Engage in activities that induce flow: Think of the activities you enjoy doing just for the heck of it. If you enjoy doing something for the experience itself, that is likely a flow activity for you. As adults, we tend to focus on our careers and family, and those flow inducing activities tend to take a back seat. Flow begets flow - so go back to doing what you enjoy doing.
• Clear goals: Think about what would make the day excellent. This usually requires a bit of planning - but the less time you spend in a state of trying to figure out what to do, where you are prone to distractions that keep you in alpha state, the higher chance you'll be able to get into a flow state. Flow redeems the hard work - a checklist without flow is burnout.

Finally - once you are in a flow state, you stay in a flow state by managing distractions and preventing the prefrontal cortex from getting involved. Dropping out of flow can be expensive, and can take up to 15 minutes to get back into it. Phone, email, looking at the clock, checking social media - all of these items distract and interrupt your productivity.

Four Common Ways We Miss the Mark When Listening

 We all know that the secret to great relationships - whether personal or professional - is communication. And we all know that a major component of communication is listening - but we rarely encounter any tips on how to actually listen, and what makes for effective listening. For many people, it's only in the realm of something like therapy do we ever hear terms like 'active listening', and we start being exposed to how to communicate effectively.

I was listening to an interview with author Oscar Trimboli recently, and he mentioned the four common mistakes made when listening, and it struck me as one of the first times I've heard effective listening being defined so clearly - albeit through the contrast of mistakes.

The first thing I'll point out - all of these mistakes come from a good place. They come from the listener wanting to help. I think that is a critical point to reinforce - although the mechanism may miss the mark, the intent and effort is genuine. The second thing to point out - these items are not mutually exclusive, and there are often aspects of more than one mistake being. The final thing I'll point out - no one is immune from making these mistakes, and listening is a continual practice.

1) Dramatic listener. This person listens (most likely unknowingly) for emotional cues, and uses that as a springboard to tell their own version of a story with a similar emotion. The intent is good and genuine, to establish a bond with the speaker by demonstrating they have been in a similar situation. However, the end result is that the original speaker usually feels their story is dismissed or diminished.

Years ago I saw this Dilbert comic, and it stuck with me. The dramatic listener is basically Topper.

I think that to avoid being Topper, it's important to remember that whatever the speaker is saying, it's not about you, the listener. It's about them. Retelling a bigger and better story isn't being empathetic, it's at best sympathetic (see this post to read about the difference), and at worst dismissive.

2) Interrupting listener. We process thoughts and words much faster than we can speak them. The interrupting listener hears the start of a story, and in their desire to save time, interrupts the speaker to move things along by completing sentences or phrases. This is especially true if the speaker pauses for a few moments to collect their next batch of thoughts. Again, this comes from a good place (saving time, or wanting to help the speaker find the words of phrase they may seemingly be struggling to find), but more often than not, it backfires. Blurting out the incorrect word or phrase can easily derail the speaker and cause them to backtrack. Ironically, the interrupting listener often ends up wasting, rather than saving, time because of this.

Oscar's suggestion in this case is to treat a pause as a word - it has a beginning, middle, and end; after the pause, wait to a count of three before attempting to speak. More often than not, the speaker will have had enough time to get their next thoughts out, and the conversation continues on smoothly.

3) The lost listener. This person disengages from the speaker and is usually thinking about their last, or next, thought. In some ways, this listener is not really listening, but waiting for their chance to speak. Other times, the lost listener doesn't know what their role in the conversation is. If someone starts rattling off a story, and you are questioning your involvement in hearing the story, you are probably the lost listener. A lot of times, simply asking 'So, what is it you are looking to me for?' Sometimes the speaker just wants someone to listen so they can vent. Other times they may want your opinion on something. Once it is established what your role in the conversation is, it's a lot easier to remain engaged and make it a productive exchange.

4) The shrewd listener. This is very prevalent in fields where people are looked upon for their expertise - such as doctors, lawyers, and consultants. These people tend to listen to the start of a story, and begin solving the problem before the person has finished speaking. Once again, the intent is good natured and genuine, as they often want to portray confidence that the speakers issue is common enough and there is a solid solution. However the shrewd listener can easily become susceptible to confirmation bias and misdiagnosis if the problem has been 'solved' before all pertinent details have been conveyed, as pieces of evidence that don't conform to the diagnosis are dismissed or their importance minimized.

The remedy here is to let the person finish speaking, and ask follow up questions to verify understanding before coming up with a diagnosis. As an IT consultant, I know the mistake of the shrewd listener well - having worked with people who make the mistake, and having made it myself. I've learned that more confidence is portrayed by being silent when I need to be silent, and not being afraid to ask follow up questions that may seem simple or stupid. It's not uncommon that those 'simple' questions end up resulting in an answer that was different than I was originally thinking they would, which clarifies understanding of the situation overall.

Once again - all of these mistakes are made from an honest and well meaning place, but the execution of that help happens to be flawed. I've made all of the mistakes above and continually try to improve my own listening skills, and knowing what the common mistakes are makes it easier to identify when I am committing one.