We're all broadcasters now

Is “shadowy” a word that conveys trust? Do you think, when you get on your seventh videoconference of the day, “That guy, who looks like he’s doing a TV interview from witness protection - that guy, who barely emerges from the shadows - that’s the guy I want to listen to!”?

No. You do not. You can’t help it. This is how our brains work. We need to see each other’s faces - especially each other’s eyes - to build connections, to build trust.

Here’s Christian Jarrett’s 2019 BBC Future piece on eye contact: “ . . . research also shows that eye contact shapes our perception of the other person who meets our gaze. For instance, we generally perceive people who make more eye contact to be more intelligent, more conscientious and sincere (in Western cultures, at least), and we become more inclined to believe what they say.”

It looks like we’ll be working from home well into 2021. After seven months of pandemic life, some of us are still in spit-and-baling-wire home office mode. If you haven’t yet, it’s time to get serious about your home office set up. It’s time to think about how people see you online. I’m not talking about backgrounds here - I don’t care if you are sitting in front of perfectly curated bookcases or in your kitchen like I do, I’m talking about your face!

Here’s Paul Zak in Harvard Business Review in 2017, in his piece “The Neuroscience of Trust,”: “Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.”

As we continue building and rebuilding our “new normal’ every week, don’t we all need less stress, to be happier with our lives, to trust and connect with our colleagues who we aren’t seeing across the conference room table?

Weirdly, building that trust right now requires a little vanity. “Do I look good on camera?” used to be a question only a narcissist would ask. Now it’s a question we all have to ask and answer.

So get a damn ring light. Adjust your monitor so the camera angle doesn’t make you look like an ominous giant or a tiny elf. Let us see your head and shoulders - the same way we’d see you across a table. Because people need to see you to trust you. Because you need your colleagues to trust you. Because you need to trust them.