technology in 1970 did not gain the necessary momentum to make the Picturephone commercially viable. Attempts in the 1980s yielded the same results. The market was still reticent to shift from a traditional phone call to a video one, seemingly dooming video phones to a fate of failed innovation (Uenuma 2020).
It was only when the platform for video calls moved from phone lines to the Internet that video communication began to gain a foothold. In 1993, a University of Cambridge scientist connected a camera to the Web in an effort to monitor the department's coffee pot levels. He and his fellow scientists could check on those pots regularly online, which they did. However, to his great surprise, many other people did, too. His coffee pot cam in essence went viral (Kesby 2012).
The coffee pot cam could arguably be the genesis for a deluge of video communication innovation. Commercial webcams hit the marketplace. The “watery bloop” of a Skype call with its accompanying techno music became a familiar soundtrack for PC users in the early 2000s. But the real game‐changer was FaceTime on Apple's iPhone 4 in 2010, which prompted an endless string of software developers to create video‐based platforms for various mobile devices as well as desktops and laptops that normalized virtual video communication for the masses.
FaceTime and its cousins primed the pump for what would be one of the most extraordinary shifts in our history in the way we meet and conduct business communication.
Stay at Home becomes “Stay on Zoom”
In early April 2020, more than 90% of the population of the United States was under local or state “stay‐at‐home” orders (Chavez, Hanna, and Maxouris 2020). With face‐to‐face interactions out of the question for large swaths of the nation, people were hungry for ways to connect both professionally and personally.
In the early days of the lockdown, the focus was mostly on finding ways to connect with friends and family, and the quest largely ended with Zoom. The video meeting app was the number‐one free videoconferencing app on Apple's app store and experienced a 300% growth in daily usage by April 1 compared to the time before stay‐at‐home orders (Bary 2020). In just the first three weeks of April alone, Zoom added 100 million participants (Uenuma 2020).
Suddenly birthday parties, bridal showers, and book clubs were taking place on Zoom and other video platforms. While it couldn't provide an exact replica of an in‐person experience, it was pretty darn close, and the price was right – free. Besides which, the technology was relatively easy and usable even for those who had never used videoconferencing before. Lack of familiarity is one of the biggest barriers to adoption for any technology, and with so many people staying at home and staying on Zoom for all manner of reasons, people became more comfortable navigating the relatively intuitive interface in order to stay close but socially distanced in their personal lives.
In the workplace, though, Zoom had plenty of videoconferencing competition that was often already well‐established, if not utilized at high levels across the enterprise. WebEx, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams, along with many others, had established a strong presence in corporate America. However, many remote workers spoke of using the corporate platform when they had to but also of using a personal Zoom account when allowed by company policy. Some companies even found themselves using different platforms based upon the use case, for example, Zoom for training and Microsoft Teams for internal meetings, or WebEx for sales calls and Adobe Connect for internal presentations. This mix‐and‐match of multiple platforms presented its own challenges, which we will address in Chapter 12. Regardless of the software of choice, video communication had come into its own and opened up the eyes of new users to the benefits it could bring.
The Value of Video in a Virtual Meeting
Prior to the pandemic, the majority of the world was not a “webcam‐on” culture, even for those teams which were dispersed and worked remotely. While some organizations made it mandatory for employees to use video in virtual meetings, most left it up to the individual user to decide whether to have their camera on or off. It was not uncommon for duct tape or a sticky note to be placed strategically over the lenses of the built‐in cameras on laptops. Certain laptops already came with shutters that could be slipped over their built‐in cameras for privacy purposes – one more layer of protection against appearing unexpectedly on camera. Most people never expected, nor wanted, to be on camera.
The pandemic in essence ripped off the Band‐aid (or the duct tape) of webcam usage. Once face‐to‐face interactions became off‐limits, most people begrudgingly started turning their video on during corporate meetings, if only because they were told to give it a try. Soon enough, many video conference converts (by choice or by force) started to find the value that video can bring to virtual meetings.
Deeper Connection
Whether extroverted or introverted, humans are social beings. Taking away our ability to see others chips away at the very core of who we are, and strict social distancing can feel almost cruel to those who thrive on interpersonal contact. No wonder rates of depression have skyrocketed since the pandemic began. For humans, social interaction and social connection are understood as a core human need and the desire to connect is a fundamental drive (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Without it, humans experience distress, children experience developmental delays, loneliness creeps in, and adverse outcomes (e.g. aging, cardiovascular health risk, suicide, and mortality in general) become more common (Hawkley and Cacioppo 2010). Sure, a telephone call helps to lessen those feelings of withdrawal and isolation, but being able to see someone's face, even on a screen, adds a layer of connection that audio alone can't provide.
Video incorporated into virtual communication allows for a much deeper connection than what you can create with a disembodied voice. This is especially true if your relationship with that conversation partner was not fully formed and sufficiently built upon shared in‐person experiences in the first place. If you know someone well, a phone call with that person can feel very personal and satisfying, but that may be at least partially due to the fact that your mind can fill in the gaps of what you can't see. While chatting, you may be visualizing that person's likely body language and facial expressions, all of which gives you a much fuller experience than if you were talking to someone on the phone whom you do not know well. Perhaps you've never even met this person before. You can't fill in the gaps and achieve that satisfying deep connection because you don't have enough backstory to do so.
For those remote meetings where you are not intimately familiar with your fellow attendees, video is invaluable in creating connections that make the interaction impactful. If someone can see you speaking, you have humanized the message and made it much more likely to be remembered. Meeting research supports this idea via media richness theory (Dennis and Kinney 1998). It argues that as we receive more cues as recipients of a message across a given medium, the amount of potential information that can be transferred increases, as does the effectiveness of the communication itself. Not turning video on when meeting in a virtual environment removes one of the most powerful tools you have in conveying your message well.
Better Accountability
Think back to your most recent conference call. Perhaps you had your phone on speaker and were focused intently on what was being discussed, or perhaps you had your phone on mute so your teammates could not hear you typing away on your keyboard as you answered your emails.
One of the biggest challenges of an audio‐only meeting is the gravitational pull of multitasking. In fact, research conducted by Intercall, a large conference call company, found that 65% of conference call attendees are “doing other work” during those virtual meetings that are audio alone (Angle 2020). And why not? After all, we are only required
