Turn Your Camera On: Why Remote Presence Is a Skill, Not a Setting

I’ve been working remotely since 2011. That’s before “work from home” was a lifestyle trend, before “hybrid” became an HR policy category, before half the internet started selling ring lights. For a long time, I was often the only remote person on teams where everyone else shared a physical office. That particular situation—not fully distributed, not fully colocated—is where the sharpest presence problems emerge, and where I’ve learned the most about solving them.

I’m a software engineer, but almost none of what follows is specific to engineering. If you’re working from home and you have colleagues—anywhere—these patterns apply.

What We Actually Lose Without Video

Before getting into what works, it helps to understand what we’re compensating for.

Albert Mehrabian’s often-cited—and often misapplied—research from the 1960s suggested that in emotionally charged conversations, body language accounts for 55% of the message, vocal tone for 38%, and the actual words for just 7%. That 7-38-55 breakdown gets misquoted constantly (it applies specifically to communicating feelings and attitudes, not all conversation), but the directional point is durable: human communication is heavily weighted toward signals that aren’t words.

More recent research bears this out in video-specific contexts. A 2021 study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that camera-on participants were consistently rated as more engaged, more trustworthy, and more collaborative by observers—independent of what those participants actually said. The camera doesn’t just let people see you; it changes how everything you say gets interpreted.

In a physical meeting, you read the room without thinking about it. Someone leaning in is engaged. Someone avoiding eye contact is uncertain or uncomfortable. Someone nodding is tracking you. Strip that signal layer away—drop to audio-only—and those same behaviors become invisible. Or worse: misread entirely.

The Call That Changed How I Think About This

Several years ago, long before the pandemic normalized any of this, I joined a geographically distributed team. Most members were remote, spread across time zones, and from the start, our calls were rough. Not technically rough—audio was fine, connection was fine—but emotionally rough. Conversations got contentious quickly. People talked past each other. There was a persistent undercurrent of frustration I couldn’t fully account for.

Then one call, someone turned their camera on. Then another person. Then a few more. I don’t remember exactly how it started.

What I do remember is that the conversation was different. Noticeably, immediately different. Nothing in the agenda had changed. We were discussing the same technically contentious topics. But people measured their words more carefully. They paused before interrupting. There was something human in the room that hadn’t been there before. We started making actual progress on things that had been stuck for weeks.

I don’t have a clean scientific explanation for why this works so reliably. My working theory: when people can see your face, the consequences of words feel more real. You can be dismissive to a voice. It’s harder to be dismissive to a person.

Default to Camera On

Here’s the uncomfortable truth for a lot of remote workers: if your camera is off most of the time, you are invisible in a way that your in-office colleagues are not. This isn’t fair—it’s a property of the medium. But it has real consequences for how you’re perceived, how often you’re included, and whether your contributions register in the room.

My recommendation is simple: default to camera on. Not for every meeting forever regardless of circumstances—not when you’re sick, in a loud coffee shop, or in a back-to-back where you genuinely need a break. But as your default posture, not your exception.

This matters most when you’re the only remote person on a team of colocated colleagues. In that setup, you’re already at a structural disadvantage: conversations happen in the hallway before and after official meetings, tone is established by physical proximity, and you’re experiencing the call through a device while they’re experiencing it in the same room. The camera doesn’t fix that imbalance, but leaving it off makes it measurably worse.

Before You Buy the Expensive Webcam

When people decide to invest in their video presence, the first instinct is usually to go shopping. A better webcam, a ring light, a microphone that costs as much as a used laptop. These things can help—but they’re downstream of more fundamental problems that equipment won’t solve.

Get the basics right first.

Camera placement matters more than camera quality. If your laptop is sitting flat on a desk and you’re looking down into it, everyone on the call is looking up your nose. The camera should be at eye level or slightly above—roughly the angle a portrait photographer would choose. A stack of books under your laptop achieves the same result as a monitor arm, at zero cost. As a bonus, looking slightly up at the camera means you’re implicitly making eye contact with the people you’re talking to, rather than appearing to look down at or past them. That angle shift changes how engaged you look even if nothing else changes.

Lighting makes cheap cameras look good. Cameras are bad at backlit scenes. If your window is behind you, you’ll appear as a silhouette regardless of how many megapixels your webcam has. Face the window, or put a simple light source in front of you. A desk lamp you already own does most of what a ring light does, just less symmetrically.

After you’ve addressed placement and lighting, if you’re still unhappy with video quality, then a better camera is a reasonable next step. But in my experience, most video presence problems aren’t sensor problems.

Tell People What They’re Seeing

If you use multiple monitors—which most engineers do—tell your team. Explicitly. Early in the working relationship.

From their perspective, there are long stretches of calls where you appear to be staring off into the middle distance or, at worst, visibly not paying attention. You’re reading documentation or tracking a shared screen on your second monitor. They’re seeing you make sustained eye contact with something off-camera.

A simple upfront acknowledgment costs ten seconds and eliminates a persistent source of misread signals: “I have two monitors, so when I’m looking to my right I’m looking at the shared screen—I’m following along even when I’m not looking directly at the camera.”

More broadly: tell people the things they can’t see. If you’re going to be heads-down for an hour, say so in the team channel. If you need to step away unexpectedly, say so. The colocated equivalent of this—being visibly present at your desk—is ambient and free for your office-based colleagues. You have to replace it with deliberate communication.

The Deeper Point

Presence isn’t about any single tool or habit. It’s about recognizing that remote work removes a lot of ambient signal that colocated teams take for granted—and then actively working to replace it.

The camera is the highest-leverage starting point: always available, free to use, and meaningfully supported by research. But the broader habit is intentional communication—make the invisible visible, provide context that physical proximity would otherwise supply, and treat your digital representation of yourself as something worth maintaining.

Fifteen years in, I still think about this deliberately. The medium hasn’t become more natural with time; I’ve gotten more systematic about compensating for it.

This is the first in a planned series on working effectively from a distance—covering presence, trust-building, and collaboration across time zones and organizational contexts. If you’re a remote team member navigating any of these challenges, I’d be glad to hear what’s worked for you.

Related

• Leadership — How I think about team dynamics and communication more broadly
• Work History — Context for the distributed team environments I’ve worked across