Jillian Amodio has run out of patience for Zoom. The whole window-into-your-private-life experiment was novel in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, when it was almost a badge of honor if your children melted down onscreen or your cat made a cameo. But those days are gone, and by now most people have invested in a ring light or, at the very least, mastered the virtual background.
Ms. Amodio, 31, is not one of those people. And now that virtual meetings are here for the long haul as hybrid work becomes a permanent fixture, her tolerance for the technology, and the access it gives colleagues to her home life, has hit bottom.
“I don’t need my boss, my co-workers, my professors and my classmates to have a front-row seat to the constant schema of domestic bliss that is my life,” she said of a home life that often looks anything but blissful, with Ms. Amodio working alongside her school-age children in the open-concept kitchen of their 1,072-square-foot home in Annapolis, Md. “There are definitely people who are right there with me. They’re looking over my shoulder. They’re judging.”
All that oversharing felt like camaraderie in the beginning. But now we’re just in it forever.
Sure, great lighting can make your complexion sparkle, but at some point you might want to shut the camera off because you can’t control all that your co-workers witness, or how they interpret what they see. If your toddler starts screaming, or the dog starts barking, or the dirty dishes are visible behind you, does that mean your job performance is chaotic, too? If you have an elegant backdrop with built-in bookshelves framing a wood-burning fireplace, does that mean you make more money than the person on the other side of the screen? And how does that change the interaction?
Even your very presence on a video screen can signal to the person who’s been summoned back to the office that you still get to work from home. Cue the resentment — which can run both ways. In a March survey of office workers conducted by Loom, a video communications platform, almost 40 percent of respondents said they didn’t like seeing themselves on camera, and more than a third didn’t like the pressure of being on camera. Nearly half said they felt more engaged communicating in writing instead.
“People are feeling like they have to turn their home into a place that is presentable for work,” said Heidi Brooks, a lecturer in organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “The energy that it takes to manage that presentation of self that some workplaces demand is huge.”
Roshni Raveendhran, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, pointed out that video is data — data about you that other people are assessing, whether or not they intend to. “When you know that there is another human being who is watching and tracking you, it becomes a very evaluative experience,” she said. “And once it is an evaluative experience, it kind of goes downhill from there.”
Or, as Dr. Brooks put it: “Now we have a fuller view of people and people have a fuller view of us, and we’re not quite sure how to negotiate that. We can’t unsee what we see.”
Ms. Amodio’s graduate program at Salisbury University in Maryland, where she is studying social work, issued a video etiquette guide — no eating, no pets and no children on camera. And after the first wave of the Omicron variant, when many presumed the pandemic was over, she started seeing job listings with requirements and specifications about dedicated home-office space.
“I don’t like how they’re dictating what my home life looks like,” she said. “If my work isn’t suffering, why do you care what my office looks like?”
For many office workers, the video screen performs like a Room Rater-worthy display, with expert lighting and a curated backdrop. It’s become a palatable trade-off: If you can adapt to the technology, you may never again have to buy an Ann Taylor dress and hop on the subway at rush hour wearing heels.
But adapting can be hard work. Onyx Johnson, who runs a management consultancy in New York, moved to a whole new apartment in search of the perfect backdrop. He found it at One Manhattan Square, a luxury condo on the Lower East Side with amazing views, and video-worthy common areas like a billiard room, a wine cellar and a library.
“I needed to be someplace that would inspire me,” Mr. Johnson, 49, told me, sitting in his living room, a bank of windows and an enormous elephant ear plant behind him. Now, no matter where he sits, he has an instant conversation piece, while betraying little about his private life.
As remote work hardens into a way of life, those video backdrops are taking on unintended meanings. Patrick Ward finally perfected his office setup, after moving at the end of 2021 with his girlfriend from a cramped West Hollywood studio to an airy two-bedroom in nearby Culver City. But now that he no longer takes video calls in a closet, he has begun to wonder if his new office, situated in a dedicated bedroom with excellent audio and lighting, somehow makes him look worse.
Mr. Ward, 28, works for Rootstrap, a software development company, and some of his colleagues live in other countries, like Uruguay, without the option to work remotely. When he hops on calls with them, he’s acutely aware of the inequity. “I want to minimize as much as possible that feeling of, ‘Oh Patrick is just living it up and meanwhile we’re all stuck in the one office,’” he said.
So he modifies his behavior depending on who’s on the other end of the call. If he’s chatting with members of his own team, he’ll wander around his apartment, getting up to make a cup of coffee or a sandwich, clutching his phone to stay onscreen. But if he’s talking to other teams, he sits at his desk, an austere white wall behind him.
And if his co-workers can’t see anything about where he actually is, or what he’s doing, they can’t judge it, either.
