I know you joining video calls without video on
and this is really what makes your team dysfunctional, creates the feeling of disengagement, holes in the communications, a lack of trust, and fear of help required.
It’s exactly one year passed since I was in the office last time prior to lockdown. When some of our colleagues raised COVID as a risk at the planning event we ran Feb 2020 it was like something never happen. Life is perfectly unpredictable but this is not the theme of this article, so I move to the core idea.
Our (my teams and me) experience with video calling tools starting from a lockdown are extremely reach. The main tools we used before were Cisco Jabber, Skype for Business, and MS Teams was in the adoption phase. Of course, home internet provider networks, home wifi routers, and the rest including calling tools were totally unprepared for all working remote with video calls.
As a result, we started experimenting with:
- Zoom;
- Slack;
- Cisco Jabber;
- MS Teams;
- and good old Skype.
And what do you think? None of them was working well: hangs, difficult to set up, corporate restrictions, lack of functionality. This made stress for all and as a result, teams stopped using video during the calls. I call this wild nature effect - pain makes people feel bad about something and not easy to come back to use.
I call this wild nature effect — pain makes people feel bad about something and not easy to come back to use.
The key missing feature for the majority of the tools was background replacement. Here is how my background will look like without this :)
and with
After some time talking to black squares, getting 0 emotions and feeling of teamwork I (being scrum master) decided we have to do something with this.
What did not work:
- asking team members to enable cameras because of fluffy reasons;
- asking to enable cameras without being with video every single call yourself;
- expecting to be with video when there are technical issues;
- forcing people to be with video all the time.
What works for us:
- be yourself with video on every call and point out your feelings while talking to black squares (mentioning that when someone muted and talking there is no way to figure out :) );
- check with each team member that they have all necessary to use video;
- describe on the retrospective your loneliness while you don't see anyone and suggest an experiment for 1 iteration (standups with video on for example);
- add to the usual virtual life a bit of health care - we are using https://pleaz.io to make a quick and fun active break;
- do not give up - keep repeating and doing the same until you are happy with the results achieved;
- ask your team what they see as barriers and opportunities to overcome those. Explore your way.
All of us have a specific and own experience I’m sharing the way we passed. It really works - save your team from becoming a group of individuals by saying no to calls without the presence.
