--- title: "Possible Anti Pattern: A Remote Team Member is Never Ever Visible in Video Chat (Zoom, Teams)" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/2020/6/15/possible-anti-pattern-a-remote-team-member-is-never-ever-visible-in-video-chat-zoom-teams.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/2020/6/15/possible-anti-pattern-a-remote-team-member-is-never-ever-visible-in-video-chat-zoom-teams" published: "2020-06-15T08:59:00.533000+00:00" updated: "2020-06-15T09:01:27.472000+00:00" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Why a remote team member who never turns on the camera can signal knowledge hoarding, and small video experiments a team leader can agree on in a 1-1." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Possible Anti Pattern: A Remote Team Member is Never Ever Visible in Video Chat (Zoom, Teams) Team members that don’t show their face ever, or 99% of the time when video chatting with the team used to be OK, before COVID. But in the age of COVID this shouldn’t be the new normal. **Team facilitation and communication** with people’s faces visible can be 10 times more efficient and provide more information that audio alone cannot provide. This can also be an **early warning sign** for team members who really like to work alone and not share information, not like pairing etc. That isn’t inherently bad, but in the age of COVID and remote collaboration, Agile and XP teams need to communicate with each other and pair with each other even MORE in the age of COVID, because there’s no longer an office water cooler or coffee machine to talk with others or gain information passively. **I’d have a 1-1 w**ith each team member that seems to always have a great reason not to show their face and find a way where they could, even _partially_ show their face every once in a while. Some members might not even have a webcam (get a webcam) . Some will say their home is a mess (virtual backgrounds), some will find other creative reasons. From a skill point of view, it is just another example of “getting our of your comfort zone” and learning new skills. In this case the skills are communicating & collaborating with the team. **Examples of “experiments”** we can agree on with individual members: - Show your face at least during online team retrospectives - Show your face at least during daily meeting - Show your face at least during pairing or 1-1 meetings - Do one group presentation where you face is visible. **Is this micro managing?** I can see it being understood this way. But if we treat this as a skill that’s required as part of the team we can prevent long term knowledge hoarding and “Bus Factors” in the team because, hopefully ,people will be more likely to share information with each other, and showing your face can be the first step in this direction, or the first sign that it’s going to be difficult. ## Read next - [Is face to face pairing better?](https://www.5whys.com/articles/is-face-to-face-pairing-better.html): A look at face to face screen pairing, with Brian Marick's reasons it beats side by side pair programming and Roy Osherove's doubts about the style. - [4 ways to discover a stuck team member, and what you can do about it](https://www.5whys.com/articles/4-ways-to-discover-a-stuck-team-member-and-what-you-can-do-a.html): Roy Osherove recalls being fired as a stuck developer and shows how standups, code reviews, test reviews and pairing help a lead spot and unblock people. - [Ten Things Distributed Team Leaders Should Do](https://www.5whys.com/articles/ten-things-distributed-team-leaders-should-do.html): Ten practices for leading a distributed team, from shared Skype chat and honest status to virtual standups, code reviews and direct customer access. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/