Yes, mute your microphone, why do people need to be reminded of this.

How long have you been using video conferencing and how often do you use video conferencing. I did my first video conference more than 20 years ago when you needed special satellite connections to do it. I was at Kennedy Space Center and was conferencing with other NASA centers. We were very focused on the camera then. It was the novelty that had us focused on the camera image. Now, I want people focused on my charts and my voice not my face or worse, looks at all the faces in the audience. If my camera is off it does not indicate I am not fully engaged. I could be the presenter with my camera off. I could be fully focusing on the charts and audio with my camera off. I think you put to much emphasis on the Camera. Yes, if you are going to use the camera you gave good advice. I have been video conferencing/remote working for years. We almost never use the camera and when we do, it is most often that the subject of the camera is not a person but an object being displayed with maybe a pointer like a pencil pointing out the features of interest.

Most often we display charts and graphs or pitch decks, we don’t care to see the peoples faces, that is reserved for social chat as opposed to work conferencing. Even contract negotiation we mostly display the contract language or the basis of estimate not people.

In diplomacy or media personality negotiation maybe faces and facial expressions are more important than in the engineering work we do.

I have not unmuted my camera in the last 1000 video conferences I have participated in. I probably average 10 WebEx meetings a week. We use Teams and rarely use other features than text. Sometimes screen share or audio call but not video.

One other thing. We often conference, conference room to conference room with half dozen to as many as 20 people to a room, what is the point of the camera then. We had a Manufacturing Readiness Review about a month ago with 40 people in attendance in the conference room and probably 25 people on the line in I don’t know how many locations. Nobody had their cameras on. It was just fine. That is actually how we like it.

TEK