New employee (Gen Z} doesn’t want to meet in person

[outofofficeon]

I took on a graduate for a new position, she’d been job hunting for a few years, I felt good about giving her a hand up into a great career.
She lives about an hour away so works remotely. She bright and polite and reliable and a good member of the team.

The problem I have is that she doesn’t want to visit the office in person or meet her colleagues in person, I offered to put her up in a nice hotel and pay travel costs so that she could spend a few days with us in person. She declined. My latest issue is that she doesn’t put her camera on when we are communicating at work as part of daily work or chats. I understand she might not be very confident but I think that you have to get out of the house / your comfort zone if you want a career.

im not sure what to do- any advice oh wise ladies.

If others have their cameras on I think it might be worth asking why this employee won’t. They may prefer to be invisible but it is not unreasonable to suggest to her that the teamwork would improve if others at least knew who she was and could interact during a conversation. Will she put camera on one to one? Could it be social anxiety?

From my experience working from home, I would expect everyone to have their camera on. When I tutor online, I expect to see my students and know they are following and engaged in the lesson, unless there are genuine technical difficulties. If my students or their parents could not see me, it would be worrying for them because they have paid for a lesson with a person, not to stare at a blank screen.

She needs to see this from both perspectives. Since she is a new employee and was hired partly because you gave her a chance after she had been looking for a while, I think it would be more respectful for her to turn on her camera and attend an in-person meeting so the team can actually get to know her. She lives an hour away, not in another country.

I do not mean to be harsh, but sometimes the reason someone struggles to find work can come down to behaviour and attitude, not just circumstances. Like others have said, have a direct conversation with her. At the end of the day, you are the boss, and setting expectations clearly is the best way forward.

I work remotely and we have to have our cameras on for all staff meetings (including all staff ones of 50 plus people) we wouldn’t get away with keeping them off!

At the most basic level, are they say they are who they say they are or even where they say they are ?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/13/fake_it_worker_problem/

Honestly it was madness in the first place making a Graduate position fully remote.

The point of graduate jobs are to offer structured training, a smooth transition from studying to work, shared skill development and networking. It is incredibly difficult to support those goals while the graduate is fully remote.

I’m a massive fan of remote working, but there are some points in your career when some regular office presence will be a benefit, and early career is one of them.

I agree it sounds like her personality may not be a great fit for the team, but if you haven’t been clear about what the expectations are around things like the camera being on etc, that’s on you not her.

The camera being on during meetings is a reasonable request, and I wouldn’t let it go. I say that as someone who was on the receiving end of the same conversation from my own boss- he felt it was really rude that I kept it off, but I just didn’t like seeing myself on the screen. I now keep it turned on but I minimise the Teams window so I don’t have to look at myself.

I’d be having a pragmatic think about whether this is a person you want to continue to manage for the next X amount of years, and if she’s still in her probationary period, or within her first year/ 2 years (depending on where you are) of employment, explore your options.

Has the OP ever met this employee in person I wonder?

You're the boss. You tell her what to do! Don't allow her to rule the roost. If she refuses, despite the fact that it's having a deleterious affect on the team, you will have to reluctantly let her go.

HR view

You can still renegotiate the contract and require office working. Contracts by their very nature require updating every year doe to legal changes.

Who created it? Sounds like it needs a review and a tweak. Offer letter is the place to set expectations around home/office attendance and again in contract.

Completely reasonable to ask for camera on and assume your graduate is still in her probation period.

If you need help, look locally or online for an HR consultant that supports SME's.

IF she's autistic, there's a good chance she's not diagnosed, and even if she is diagnosed, she is under no obligation to disclose it.

Good practise for any manager is to be direct and upfront about your expectations.

If you ask me if I would like to sit on a train for several hours so I can go and stay in a hotel for a few days and socialise with people I don't know in an office, my answer would be that I absolutely do not want to do that. If you tell me that an expectation of my role is that I must do that, then I will do it. Ideally, this should have been made clear before interview!

I also hate having my camera on but I do when I'm told that it's needed.

However, it sounds like this staff member is actually doing the job she was employed to do well. OP needs to consider carefully whether her objection is actually down to productivity or whether she's confusing the office environment with a social activity.

This - all of this. Brilliant, solid, evidence-based answer.

A PP just beat me to it - I was also going to ask if she was actually North Korean. According to the media at least, there are more NKs doing fully remote jobs via laptop farms than you might expect. Have you ever seen this person OP?

My other view is: wow, there are so many grads out of work right now. You could replace this one (if you are able) with a sociable, camera-on, in office grad in a heartbeat.

I think you've probably learned a lesson about assumptions during recruitment, OP. Next time this stuff needs to be part of the conversation from the very beginning.

You do have my sympathy as I had to work alongside someone who basically refused to engage with her team (as its leader) either in person or on camera. It had a really damaging effect on the team, including her staff, and in the end she left abruptedly for a new role she refused to tell anyone about. The overall effect was like she was a spy refusing to share any personal information at all and it was unnerving. The lack of flexibility and responsiveness was very difficult.

I personally find it incredibly hard to present or talk about anything meaningful when I can't see people and their reactions, and I can't judge turn taking in conversations either. My company tends to be cameras on for the most part by default, thankfully for me, but my last one wasn't, and I hated it.

For this person I'd be thinking about what the team needs from her to be fully functional. You are a new team now she's joined and you could do an online team building session to agree how the team itself needs and wants to work - which she can be a full part of. If the majority of the team feels that cameras on is what the team needs to work best, and she still refuses, there IS a management conversation to be had as it's affecting others. But she also has the ability to contribute to that conversation and it shouldn't be a stitch up (it may be that you have got it wrong after all and other team members are actually OK with this).

For those who hate looking at themselves, Teams and Zoom both have the ability to hide your view of yourself. This hasn't always been the case but it was recognised that it is distracting and quite stressful to be able to see yourself the whole time, so anyone still sticking a post-it on their screen should find that function and use it! I usually do, once I've checked that I haven't missed any sort of wardrobe malfunction or background hiccup!

I wonder if I fed this thread into an "AI" engine, and asked the supplementary question "Can you explain why UK productivity is so low ?" I would get the answer "Do you really need to ask ?"

She bright and polite and reliable and a good member of the team.

This should be all that matters.

The rest is moaning cliched waffle about how remote working is bad for team bonding (bullshit) and how young people aren't resilient any more (bullshit).

Cameras on or off doesn't matter. It's so unimportant. The offence being taken over someone who has a camera off is hugely disproportionate.

FWIW in my company the norms are cameras on for small meetings/one-on-ones but for larger ones, no one cares. Particularly company-wide ones where 90% of staff aren't expected to contribute. It would be ridiculous to mandate cameras on for those.

My contract is fully remote and when I started, my company had shut down its London office. They've reopened it since but I have no intention of ever setting foot in it. No one's taken umbrage at that.

Also, people are capable of managing their own career progression. I don't want the kind of role where I have to constantly be around people and have face-to-face time with them, even if those roles are more senior. It is more important to me to be left alone.

A PP just beat me to it - I was also going to ask if she was actually North Korean. According to the media at least, there are more NKs doing fully remote jobs via laptop farms than you might expect. Have you ever seen this person OP?

And yet real people, with real experience, who can show up in person never get a reply.

I've never understood the kink which requires you spend 4 months plus recruiting or a role which could have been easily filled by the first applicant who was rejected because they "didn't tick all the boxes" and who given 4 months would outperform the "perfect" candidate.

Why are you asking and not telling her?

OP I agree with others that 'cameras on' is not something you have to specify in a contract for it to be a requirement.

I also think that if you are finding that you need her in sometimes and she won't agree to it, then maybe you need to dismiss her and hire someone else (obviously give her her notice (and plus some if you can afford to), and also the option to accept a contract amendment to say that some office visits are required). It's not 'fair' for her but she's presumably well under the two years period for unfair dismissal, and so you don't need a reason to dismiss her. You might just need to suck up the costs and accept this was a bad hire and you didn't fully appreciate the impact of hiring someone fully remote - you need occasional trips to the office. The situation isn't going to get better by leaving it to fester.

[This assumes that she doesn't have a disability or similar which would stop her having her camera on, or travelling to the office occasionally i.e. that any dismissal isn't discriminatory]

Yes its a management issue and if the OP is the manager she needs to deal with it. The only condition which was missing from the contract was the requirement for occasional in person visits (and a one hour travel is hardly onerous and should be doable unless there is some unmentioned need).
The rest is standard “subject to change” stuff which arises in any job and nothing to do with the contract and not “onerous conditiosn”.

One way of dealing with it is to replace a team member who declines to engage with the team. Its is not the new team member’s fault that the contract was botched but if productivity has declined (as per the OP) then one way of addressing it is to replace the employee and make damned sure the hiring process is improved.

I would start with a midway point as per my PP. Managers need to consider the overall needs of the team, not just tell the team to bend around one individual with no mentioned special needs. If the new employee is so rigid that they cannot accommodate any small change in the interests of the team then they are more suited an individual contribution role and not team/client facing work.

In reality the options are replace, sideways move to individual contributor role (if it exists) or some compromise on the part of the new employee unless the firm is happy to see productivity fall further.

Talk to an employment lawyer. If she is still on probation then ask to amend her contract. If she refuses fire her and structure the next employment contract better.

(Also I agree that camera's on shouldn't be a blanket rule - but you should probably give clarity over when it is required. Meetings over x people - only if talking. Meetings under X people - always on)

I work in a company where it is optional, as we have people with hidden disabilities who really can't manage with cameras on. I think that's ok, but will probably be in a minority, as are the people with disabilities.
You don't have to understand why, and many won't, but you do have to accept that not everyone can do it.

This should be all that matters.

Not entirely I’ve worked with bright, polite people who reliably turn up to meetings but who simply are not very good at the job. Usually they are in the wrong role which may be the case here as productivity of the team is being affected by one member declining to consider the needs of the others.
Working in a team requires some flexibility from each team member, not just the longer term members.

Also I agree that camera's on shouldn't be a blanket rule

Why not ?

Because it can impair understanding and communication (my PP upthread talks more about this). Guidelines for where it helps and where it hinders should be available to staff and followed.

The fake person issue is still relatively recent for most companies but the commonest solution I’ve seen to this is to have cameras on to say “hi” then off again for meetings where it gets in the way. They should (ideally) already be validating the identities of calls from phones and using secure corporate login only to join meetings (yeah I know…)

I think you will likely have to put this down to a lesson learned as I think you were overly generous to begin with re the wholly wfh criteria. I don’t think an hour journey is bad at all. Most my graduate positions have been easily 3 hour round trips.

I have a similar experience within the Civil Service so it doesn’t say in my contract anything about needing to have your camera on and in fact in the majority of calls no one does.

However, the culture is slowly changing e.g., in my last team, the manager advised that she wanted everyone’s cameras to be on on our Fri end of week team call when we did a summary of the status of current work/forward look etc. We were told if anyone had any issues to talk to our line manager in advance. Of course no one wanted to be the odd one out so we all did put ours on. I think this is the way to go really to sort of phase it in. Then in the next team I went to again no contractual expectations but everyone seemed to have cameras on most of the time so I joined suit but left it off if there were days I just didn’t want to and that was fine.

There is also in my contract the expectation that travel will be involved and I’m expected to meet up for anything from a stakeholder meeting to a team social bonding event - that should definitely have been in the original contract. I wouldn’t be offering hotel overnight stays though if it’s within a 2 hour distance unless starting extremely early or ending very late!