Bosses have always placed a high value on face-to-face office work. However, during the pandemic many companies have had to revise their policies, as the rise of remote work or “telecommuting” has made them realize that employee productivity is not as closely related to the time they spend in an office.

Still, bosses have had another option to control that face-to-face time, which is that employees keep their webcams on during meetings. Executives believe that someone who turns off their webcam or has their microphone muted is less engaged with the company and their job.
Turning off the webcam or being muted is not necessarily a sign of being disconnected, some people may just want to hide a disorganized room or mute their children’s noise.

A better solution to this problem might be for managers to reconsider their attitudes about multitasking.
If employees multitask during virtual meetings, perhaps it is for a valid reason. Executives schedule many meetings with their employees to substitute for not seeing them face-to-face. A 2021 survey estimated that professionals now spend 21.5 hours in meetings per week, up from 15.1 hours in 2020.
If managers are still concerned that employees are not paying attention during calls, they should consider reducing the number of superfluous meetings.

It’s true that multitasking makes it difficult for people to fixate their full attention on a single topic: if an employee is writing a report during a department meeting, he or she will probably have difficulty remembering what all of his or her coworkers have said. But there are ways to multitask without diminishing the ability to concentrate.

Studies say that doodling during a conference helps students retain information. People who do activities such as folding laundry, making the bed, tidying the bedroom, or lifting weights during a meeting do so automatically, so they are not distracted from the meeting in question.
If it’s confusing for executives to see black or white squares on the screen and they want to see their employees’ faces more often, perhaps it’s time to assess what activities are acceptable during calls.

Early in the pandemic, the president of a U.S. city council started meetings by asking his colleagues to explain what else they were doing at the time, to prevent others from being distracted by background noises. A CFO of one company left the webcam on while doing her household chores, and said “life is a mess right now, and we just have to accept it”.