Seemingly everyone who is not a meeting scientist has a theory or piece of research to support the claim that you should turn off your camera during meetings, most recently in this Harvard Business Review article.

None of this new research conjoins camera activity to meeting quality. Simply stated: blinded meetings lose the visual cues that drive most of human-to-human behavior.

Instead, too many people are simply comfortable wallowing in the mire of meetings that suck.

As Nir Eyal recently described in his article, The Pinky Promise, “the root cause of all human behavior is the desire to escape discomfort.”

Turning off the camera is the comfortable thing to do – and it matches previous behavior.

But it’s not the right thing to do.

Instead, per a real meeting scientist, Joe Allen, “leaving cameras on, making meetings engaging, and learning how to reduce meetings by making them better takes effort.”

Working smarter with meetings also means working a little bit harder to make them worth it. But there’s no downside to making every second of your life count.

#zoomfatigue #meetings #meetingscience #neuroscience #humanbehavior #endlessmeetings #meetingfacilitation #meetingmanagement #meetingtips