I am staring at a pixelated version of my boss’s left nostril and I can feel my soul leaving my body. We are forty-two minutes into a “sync” that could have been a three-sentence Slack message. I look at the gallery view. Fourteen other people are doing the exact same thing: nodding performatively while clearly checking their email in another tab. This isn’t work. It’s a seance where we try to summon the ghost of productivity, but the ghost is busy doing actual stuff.
We have been told that “face-to-face” is the only way to build trust. That’s a lie. Trust isn’t built by looking at someone’s messy bookshelf through a grainy webcam. Trust is built by people doing what they said they were going to do, on time, without needing a babysitter. If you want a high-performance culture, you have to kill the camera. You have to stop the synchronous bleeding.
The Tuesday I realized I was failing
It was March 14, 2021. I remember the date because I had just spent $440 on DoorDash vouchers for a “Virtual Team Building Pizza Party.” We had seventeen people on a Zoom call. I had this grand plan for a creative brainstorm using a digital whiteboard. I thought I was being a great leader. I thought I was “fostering connection.”
Instead, it was a funeral for a cat nobody liked. There were these long, agonizing silences where the only sound was the clinking of glasses. Every time someone tried to speak, two other people started at the same time, followed by five seconds of “No, you go,” “No, sorry, go ahead.” It was pathetic. I looked at the faces—these were brilliant engineers and designers—and they looked exhausted. Not from work, but from the theater of work. I ended the call early and sat in silence for twenty minutes. I realized then that I wasn’t running a team; I was hosting a low-budget talk show that nobody wanted to watch.
That was the day I decided to stop. No more mandatory video. No more “quick syncs.” We went cold turkey on synchronous video for a month just to see what would happen. I tracked everything. My deep work hours jumped from an average of 2.1 hours a day to 5.8 hours. The team’s output—measured by merged pull requests and finished designs—went up by 34%. Output goes up when the cameras go off. It’s not a coincidence.
Writing is the only thing that matters
Here is the hard truth that makes people uncomfortable: If you can’t express your idea clearly in writing, you don’t actually have an idea yet. You have a vibe. And vibes are what kill companies.
Most people use meetings as a crutch for lazy thinking. It’s easy to hop on a call and “jam” on something. It’s much harder to sit down and write a 600-word proposal that anticipates objections and outlines a clear path forward. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Writing is a forcing function for clarity. When you force your team to communicate asynchronously through tools like Notion or Linear, you aren’t just saving time. You are raising the intellectual bar of the entire organization.
I’ve become a bit of a zealot about this. I honestly think that if you can’t write, you shouldn’t be in a leadership position in a remote company. That sounds harsh, and I know people will disagree—they’ll say they’re “verbal thinkers” or whatever—but I don’t care. Verbal thinkers in a remote environment are just people who steal other people’s focus because they’re too disorganized to draft a memo. Writing is thinking. Everything else is just noise.
The quality of your company is the average quality of your internal documentation.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that once you move to a writing-first culture, the need for video vanishes. You don’t need to “see” the person to understand the logic of their argument.
The irrational hatred of Loom
I have to get this off my chest. I hate Loom. I know, I know—it’s the darling of the remote work world. Everyone says it’s the perfect middle ground. It’s not. It’s a hostage video. I refuse to use it and I tell my friends to avoid it like the plague.
When someone sends me a 5-minute Loom, they are essentially saying, “My time is more valuable than yours, so instead of me taking 3 minutes to write a concise summary, I’m going to make you sit through 5 minutes of me stuttering and moving my mouse in circles.” Plus, I can’t skim a video. I can’t search a video for a specific keyword three weeks later. It’s just a meeting that I can’t talk back to. It’s the worst of both worlds. Just write the email. Or send a screenshot with an arrow on it. We aren’t children; we don’t need a bedtime story to understand a bug report.
How to actually do it without losing your mind
So, how do you keep the “culture” if you aren’t staring at each other? You focus on the work. High-performers don’t actually want “culture” in the way HR defines it. They don’t want Slack channels for pictures of your sourdough starter (though those are fine, I guess). They want to do great work with other smart people and then go live their actual lives.
Here is the framework I used. It’s not fancy, but it works:
- The 24-Hour Rule: No one is expected to respond to anything in less than 24 hours. If it’s an emergency, you call their phone. (Spoiler: It’s never an emergency).
- The Memo Requirement: Any decision involving more than two people requires a written document. No document, no discussion.
- Public by Default: Everything happens in public channels. Private DMs are where information goes to die.
- The “No-Meeting” Bounty: I used to give out small bonuses or coffee gift cards to people who successfully canceled a recurring meeting by replacing it with a better process.
I used to think that we needed those “watercooler moments” to stay bonded. I was completely wrong. What bonds a team is winning. What bonds a team is shipping a product that doesn’t break and knowing exactly what is expected of them. We use Slack for the social stuff, sure. We have a channel where we talk about the absolute trash movies we watched over the weekend. But we don’t pretend that a Zoom happy hour is a substitute for a well-run project.
The part I’m still not sure about
I’ll be honest: I don’t know if this works for everyone. I might be wrong about the social isolation part. I’ve noticed that some of the younger hires—the ones who started their careers during the pandemic—seem a bit more twitchy about the lack of video. They feel like they’re working into a void. I try to compensate with more 1:1 text check-ins, but I wonder if I’m being too cold. Maybe there is a human element I’m ignoring because I’m a grumpy person who just wants to be left alone to do my job.
But then I look at the data again. I look at the 6.1 hours of deep work. I look at the fact that my team hasn’t had a single person quit in two years. In this industry, that’s basically a miracle. We aren’t “connected” because we see each other’s faces. We are connected because we respect each other’s time enough to stay off their screens.
Stop the calls. Start the writing.
Is everyone on your team actually happy, or are they just good at smiling for the camera?
