To think that people could attend meetings in person?

[Zorilla]

Just that really. Where I work most of us are in most days due to the nature of our job. However, whenever we have project or team meetings, only about 1/3 of the people will go into the meeting room, everyone else joins from their desk over Teams, with camera off.

AIBU to find this irritating? Today we had a team meeting, which is a conversational meeting rather than PowerPoint presentations. I was in the meeting room but only one other person joined me so I ended up just talking to a black screen of faceless people with their microphone off. What is the point?

If you're well enough to work you're well enough to switch your camera on. Other people's reactions to your hat/pain relief is for them to manage.

Does your line manager know this is what you do? If so that's cool. I have period issues and do similar.

It needs clarifying when the meeting is arranged if it is online, in person with a room number, or hybrid.

If people are regularly joining from their desk with cameras off, my gut instinct would be to question whether the meetings were valuable to everyone or whether we needed to review how effective they are.

If I could attend many meetings from my desk, with my camera off and multitask on my other work, I'd probably think that's a meeting I didn't need to be in.

Meet in person or no meeting. Hybrid is pretty pointless and doesn't allow the kind of nonverbal communication and chit chat that makes meetings useful.

If people must wfh, they should have cameras on.

Currently in my office a high percentage of people have nasty lingering head colds with hacking coughs. I have zero desire to sit in a room with them and so I get why this is so popular. Zero to do with COVID, I always felt this way. I can do something about it now.

What difference does it make if they are in the room or not?

So many meetings are pointless anyway.

If people don't want to attend in person maybe the meeting organisers should start asking themselves if they are scheduling too many meetings where nothing of use is said and done...

If it was me I would walk around the building rounding everyone that was there up. Its disrespectful. We had our meetings on teams but everyone had their camera on, it was the only time we actually saw each other. I don't think we were all together again after covid then the job ended.
The team manager should be doing their job and getting everyone to attend face to face. Sounds like morale is low and they arent interested in their job...

I’m suspicious of cameras being off in meetings. Suggests they’re not paying attention.

If it’s your team, then tell them! If they’re in the building, they need to come to the meeting room.

Excuse me??? Who died and made you boss???

Unfortunately if I want to keep my job (or any job) I can't take sick leave every time I have head / facial pain or a migraine.

I'm certainly not comfortable having the camera on when I'm wearing a cool patch that looks like a sanitary towel on my head, or my face is twitching.

@bonjourmonami yes, my line manager (and previous manager) are aware... Unfortunately since covid, what was occasional migraines and headaches has now grown into very frequent pain. Thankfully I have a supportive, understanding manager

Cameras off are a problem when you want someone’s attention and have no way
of knowing if you have it. I don’t see why a camera view is a must-have if it’s obvious that someone is actively participating in a meeting. In this poster’s case, the discomfort she’d feel being on camera seems to massively outweigh the benefit to anyone else.

As someone who gets terrible sinus infections from time to time that last months, I can sympathise. I don’t like seeing myself reflected back on my screen at the best of times, but when I’m breathing with my mouth open due to congestion it’s torture and I find myself fixating on what that looks like.

To the op’s original question, yes, I find this both rude and weird unless it’s a very relaxed, drop-in-type affair.

If the meetings are pointless, why is nobody pointing this out? Why can no one say that they’re very busy so that day they’ll join online but will be on mute and without the camera on as they’re working on something at the same time? I have done both with non-essential meetings. If they can’t express this, I tend to think either that the meetings aren’t as pointless as all that or they’re arranged by someone more senior they can’t say no to - in which case, surely you just suck it up?

Our team meetings are 5-6 people and informal. I'd be happy to get rid of them, and have suggested so in the past, but the team were pretty insistent that they wanted to keep them. Yet their behaviour suggests otherwise. I could compel people to come in person if I felt it was worth the hassle.

Our project meetings are larger ~10 people and I think some people just join over Teams so they can keep in touch with what is going on but don't want to fully engage. This is more tolerable as there is usually a critical mass of people who are engaged. However, it does sometimes generate the feeling that you are having a small meeting with a ton of eavesdroppers!

If you have colleagues who discriminate you for the way you manage your pain/condition then that is a management/discrimination issue to be taken up with their line managers.

No reason - if you are well enough - for you not to be visibly participating in your workplace.

Anything else plays into the idea that you should have to hide yourself away.

You should not.

I would have walked over to each team member, wheeled them into the meeting room (if they're too lazy to attend the meeting in person, I presume they are took lazy to stand up and walk) one by one.

As I said earlier in the thread, you don't build decent presentation skills from sitting in front of a pc with the camera off. You don't learn body language, eye contact, how to manage nervous tics/fidgeting, etc.

We all used to have to get up and present our updates from the front of the board room and it massively helped my confidence after doing it loads of times. We were even filmed a few times so we could watch ourselves back and get an idea of what we looked like. At first I said "um" a lot and looked awkward but six months in I was a confident speaker. Watching somebody squirm and go all red/sweaty in a client meeting is pretty awkward for all involved.

Also, it's not always just a case of meetings not being useful (although I have sat through a lot of engagement crap). Plenty of people would just rather be checking their Instagram etc.

Oh I worked in a place like this before covid. People just stayed at their desks, was such a weird vibe and weird people. Usually I make lots of friends at work, this place I barely got to know everyone. People were very much there just to "do their job", no culture, no vibe. I lasted less than 6 months!! Horrible experience, I used to actually have dread in the pit of my stomach when walking to the lift to start my day

I would put in the body of the invite ‘those in the office please attend in person in the meeting room.” I think they’re trying to multi task and do other work whilst the meeting is on. I’d find it odd to be talking to someone that I can see across the floor or something!

I think the point is the business's objectives, and people communicating as much or as little as the meeting required.

If I'm honest I get a bit tired of people trying to thrust their urge to talk "face to face" on their coworkers when it is not required - what a waste of time.

I had a meeting yesterday where 4 people were in the office and 3 of us were not. The 4 that were sat in a room together seemed to mess about for ages before we could get going. I thought this is how it used to be. It's a social event but it doesn't get the business done. In person meetings are for lonely sods to get some personal interaction is my view!

@pompomdaisy that’s a weird view. I’m not in the least bit lonely but yes I do like interaction. I do think a lot of the “cameras off” clan are doing other things which is rude. I worry about younger members of staff too who get no idea of team dynamics etc with all these hideous on line meetings with black screens.

Yeah sometimes this is true, there’s a single parent at my work who has a child with high level needs so she has limited adult social interaction and she seems to be very insistent about people putting Cameras on and attending in person and is always suggesting more meetings . I’ve always linked it to her hunger for more socialising.

for too long the pendulum swing in the way of extrovert and/or neurotypical people and now things have shifted slightly to accommodate others, I think there’s some discomfort from some corners.

sounds like much of your meetings could be an email. You said they reject the suggestion but you could raise it again and insist that if they don’t attend in person you reduce /cut the meetings . Put the ball back in their hands.

Stopped doing meetings that should have been an email about 7 years ago and its why I wont do corporate again. As it is, camera off is the best you would get out of me now!

A well facilitated meeting with the right people can never be an email, the people who think this can't be particularly effective in their jobs or haven't worked in effective teams

This.

Where I work we don't have that many meetings, once a month or less, probably not enough tbh.

But if this was supposed to be a worthwhile meeting, not one that 'could have been dealt with in an email' then it wouldn't have even started until everyone was present in person and if anyone was late, they would have been phoned and told to attend and they would have been spoken to later about their tardiness and failure to engage. And we're very laid back compared with a lot of places.

Or have been in too many meetings scheduled by people trying to prove that they are very important.