A video call feels like a phone call that happens to have a camera on.
You dial in, you focus on what you need to say, and you hang up. The technology never asks you to look at yourself. So the setup goes unexamined, sometimes for years.
This is not carelessness. It is the nature of the tool. Your phone never showed you your face, and the webcam quietly inherited that habit.
Here is what I see in coaching sessions. When a person finally watches themselves the way their audience sees them, the most common reaction is surprise. Not embarrassment. Surprise. They had simply never looked.
And why would they? The metrics their company tracks do not include it. Sales numbers, project delivery, conversion rates, all measured. How they come across in the meetings where those numbers get won or lost, not measured anywhere.
The research says it matters. In 2025, Yale researchers played more than 5,100 people the same recordings, changing only the sound. When the audio sounded tinny, listeners rated the speaker as less hirable, less credible, and less intelligent. The same message, judged less believable, because of sound.
Fauville and her colleagues found in 2022 that looking into the camera reads as more sociable, and that a low camera angle raises threat judgments. The viewer forms these impressions without noticing they are doing it.
Your workforce is being evaluated on signals nobody taught them to see.
The good news is that these signals are observable. I work with five skills: Eye Contact, Lighting, Sound, Background, and Gestures. Each one can be seen on screen, coached in minutes, and scored in a way an L&D leader can put in a report. It is a skills-based diagnostic that produces a personalized pathway, delivered in the flow of a normal working day.
This is not a new scorecard for judging people. Your team members are already accountable for results. The five skills simply remove the friction standing between their work and the people watching it.
One story. I was interviewed by the publisher of my books, on camera, about the books. By the end of the call he had decided on two changes to his own setup, on his own, with no instruction from me. He watched a coached presenter on his screen for thirty minutes and saw the difference. That is how this skill transfers. Demonstration, not lecture.
I have coached presenters for over twenty five years. The webcam changed everything about the job, and the training has not caught up.
So here is the question I would put to any leader whose team lives on camera.
When was the last time anyone on your team saw themselves the way their audience sees them?
Ray Franklin is a presentation coach for teams that work on camera. His book, The Modern Engagement Standard, is written for the L&D professional.
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