As I write these words, I’m also participating in a required “webinar” on the “Safety, Respect, and Inclusiveness” policy at an organization I’m part of. You probably have endured the same kind of thing: you watch a series of little videos, answer some multiple-choice questions, and then there’s a Zoom meeting where everyone has to participate.
There’s often some kind of commissar who runs the thing, demanding that everyone keep their cameras on to ensure all of us are paying attention to the scenario in which a guy rubs up against a co-worker and says, You smell so good today, so that we’re all very, very clear that this is speech and/or action that violates the “Safe Workplace” standards at this organization.
I’ve done dozens of these things since they became the law of the land a few years ago. Each one has had a slightly different focus and a unique set of weasel words. We’re just trying to provide managers with tools for their toolbox, I recall one webinar leader purring into her computer‘s microphone. There will be time during our session for reflection and mental gathering of key learnings today, intoned another in a vocal delivery that can only be described as “NPR syrup.” But this one was the first one in which the person leading the “workshop” said these very welcome, very unexpected words:
Feel free to keep your cameras off.
At which point, everyone in the little boxes went through the same reaction phases: Surprise — Is she serious? Did I hear that right? — followed by nervous laughter — Who’s going to go first? — followed by a brief second of hesitation and then … Poof! Everyone suddenly disappeared, replaced by whatever icon or photo they chose years ago. In a moment, our Zoom screens were filled with still images of beaches, cats, families, mountainscapes, one or two Christ is King images, and a bunch of simple black tiles. Behind each, though, was the same thing: someone with a very broad and happy smile happily going about doing something more pressing than learning that you’re not supposed to touch a co-worker, or yourself, in a suggestive manner, no matter how good they or you smell.
Behind my Zoom image — for the record: me, arms stretched, in front of two helicopters, and yes, I know that sounds a little, as the young people say, “cringe” — I was typing away, trying to get a few things done before we all had to reappear to wave goodbye. One of those things was engaging with an unhelpful ChatGPT bot at my internet service provider. Another was typing this.
But as I got to the important stuff, I wondered optimistically if maybe we’ve all turned a cultural corner. I did one of these webinars less than 12 months ago, and we were pointedly not invited to turn off our cameras. The whole enterprise unfolded in the most serious and irritating way. I’m pretty sure that if one brave soul had timidly asked, in the chat window, if it might be possible to turn off our cameras, the very question would have been deemed an aggression that violated the “Safe Workplace” standards at this organization. But now, here we all were, merrily ignoring the entire process.
This could be, as venture capitalists like to say, an inflection point. We’ve all realized, perhaps, that all of these tedious training sessions do nothing but annoy everyone. We’ve all tacitly agreed that they’re a waste of time — like a lot of things in the business world that people do just because the lawyers and the insurance companies make them — and so we’re all aligned on how to make it all work: sign in, cameras off, go about your business.
The next step would be not to sign in at all, to have these time-killing events stricken from the Microsoft Teams calendar. But that’s unlikely to happen. For the past few years, an entire industry of coaches and consultants and independent “Do Not Touch” training products has sprouted up, and those people need to eat, too. They’re probably doing that at their desks, with the cameras off.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
