Today, 70% of U.S. Fortune 500 companies have settled into a hybrid work arrangement, according to Work Forward’s Q2 2025 “Flex Index” research, with the majority of those requiring three days in-office.

As a result, a smaller portion of employees’ meeting participation happens over a video connection compared with a few years ago. Leaders in these hybrid organizations may be asking themselves, “Can we stop worrying about ‘Zoom fatigue’ and just tell workers they have to keep their meeting cameras on?”

Short answer: No.

Longer, more important answer: If you’re concerned that employees aren’t staying focused in virtual meetings, invisibility isn’t the problem, and cameras aren’t the answer.

Indeed, more now than ever, research suggests that blanket policies about using cameras in virtual meetings are likely to make the disengagement problem worse. Even in hybrid work arrangements—designed to combine the benefits of both in-person work and reduced commutes—employee engagement is declining. Two key underlying causes:

• Employer–employee trust is getting weaker.
• Employee angst, including fear of obsolescence, is growing stronger.

In a hybrid work environment, the best practice may be this: View camera usage as a symptom or measure of employee engagement problems, rather than a solution.

“Requiring that cameras be turned on is too trivial of a structural change to actually address the disengagement problems that companies are facing,” says Erin Eatough, an organizational psychologist and cofounder of consulting firm Fractional Insights.

Let’s dig into why this is the case.

Virtual meetings are both blessing and curse

During COVID-19 lockdowns, virtual meetings kept much of the working world from grinding to a halt. Nervous about checked-out employees, many leaders applied a “cameras on at all times!” edict. This led to the infamous “Zoom fatigue” syndrome as employees found a daily regimen of multiple on-camera meetings exhausting.

So companies wrestled with the cameras-on-or-off decision, sometimes switching back and forth, with opinions plentiful but data lacking. As we explored in “Video call burnout: Cameras on or off?”, research gradually emerged to demonstrate that:

• Video meeting fatigue is real (and different from simply looking at an electronic screen). 2025 research published in Sloan Management Review, confirms this finding yet again. The exhaustion from being on-camera is “neurologically demonstrable,” the researchers wrote.
• Adding video doesn’t increase attendees’ degree of focus.
• Cameras-on meetings don’t perfectly recreate the benefits of in-person meetings.
• And cameras-on meetings don’t make everyone feel equally included.

Now in hybrid arrangements, employees spend one to three days working remotely, and the other days in the office. Overall, this approach appears to work. For example, 2024 Stanford research found that compared to fully on-site work, “hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates.”

However, the idea that hybrid work means fewer video meetings, or that video fatigue is no longer an issue compared to our prior fully remote world, is not so cut-and-dried.

For starters, the overall meeting load continues to grow, and most of these meetings include at least some virtual participants—88% of employees reported that’s the case, in an Owl Labs 2024 study of 2,000 U.S. respondents. For those in the office, the experience is “a mix of looking at people and also looking at a screen with the portion of the team that’s distributed,” notes Eatough. In addition to the uneven way this divides attention, “You’re in-person, but not 100% able to rekindle the magic of in-person,” Eatough says. In some cases, virtual attendees are now commuters dialing in from the car, having no camera stress but more distractions to deal with.

The Owl Labs research also found that only about half of companies trained either managers or employees on how to lead effective hybrid meetings, suggesting that many professionals aren’t fully set up to make the most of virtual collaboration.

But for a growing number of organizations, that’s not the biggest problem.

The simmering cauldron of mistrust and angst

SAP Success Factors’ research in the 2025 report The top 5 HR trends today ranks two relevant issues as vital for organizational success: reconnecting unengaged employees, and successfully managing hybrid work. Mistrust and angst are fundamental obstacles to achieving those goals.

Trust and mistrust between employers and employees seesaw over the years. Today, the trend is moving in the negative direction. For example, PwC’s annual Trust study finds a growing disconnect between these two groups. In the 2024 survey, 86% of business executives said their organization is “highly trusted,” but a much lower percentage of employees—67%—said the same. That gap is four points wider than in the preceding year.

Low levels of trust can poison a corporate culture and lead to dysfunctional behaviors. Eatough says that Fractional Insights surveys find 38% of workplaces are “mutually exploitative: The employer tries to extract as much as possible from its workforce, and employees try to get away with as much as they can.”

For example, there’s coffee badging, a term that has entered the hybrid work lexicon to describe workers who fulfill the in-office requirement in the minimal way possible. They might, for example, drop by the office long enough to use their access card and perhaps join an in-person meeting, or just have a cup of coffee, before returning home. While this behavior seems relatively benign, actions like this that suggest a lack of mutual trust tend to snowball. As we wrote in the SAP report, “Left unresolved, we anticipate that employees will resort to more extreme and highly problematic counterproductive behaviors as a method of coping with stress, retaliating, or regaining control—sabotaging deliverables, withholding important information, even taking legal action.”

Angst is the term Eatough uses to describe an array of negative employee sentiments, including fear for their jobs, concerns that their skills are becoming obsolete, and the feeling that their work is insignificant or unrecognized.

These issues have a material effect on organizational performance, both in productivity and in turnover. According to Fractional Insights, angst increases the likelihood of disengagement by 5.5 times, and willingness to leave tomorrow for another offer by seven times.

Implementing cameras-on requirements for a workforce that already feels burned out and disconnected can end up exacerbating these issues. In fact, if mishandled, mandates of any sort can cause workers to feel they are being infantilized, lacking agency to make decisions that balance company and personal needs, says Eatough.

So why are we still talking about video cameras?

A workforce that doesn’t want to engage face-to-face during virtual meetings may be symbolic of a looming symptom of a much larger problem. To restore employee trust and relieve angst, businesses need to launch dedicated initiatives aimed at issues like increasing transparency and demonstrably prioritizing employee well-being.

Rather than exacerbating the problem with camera mandates, here are three tactics that can help increase employee engagement in a hybrid work world, returning a sense of agency to employees:

Always explain the “why.” People are more likely to get on board with a request if they understand there’s a good reason behind it. For example, explaining why cameras could be valuable for a portion of the meeting demonstrates managers’ thought processes and makes buy-in more likely. It helps participants understand that “it’s not about taking away agency, but about leading the team to a specific goal,” Eatough says.

Talk about where the boundaries lie. Even more so in hybrid work, “work is so permeable, there aren’t clear lines anymore for many people” between personal and work lives, Eatough says. This contributes to burnout. She advocates for what she calls boundary dialogue between managers and their teams: “There has to be more explicit, two-way conversation about expectations and what the boundaries or lack of boundaries are.”

Beyond discussing which meetings or segments need cameras on (and why), Eatough writes in Sloan Management Review about understanding the types and timing of communications that interrupt employees’ work or intrude on their personal time.

Not all managers are accustomed to having these discussions or making adjustments based on employee input. That comes down to training as well as consistent, top-down demonstration.

Address underlying causes of disengagement. Like Rome, trust isn’t built in a day, and neither will AI-induced career angst instantly disappear. However, concrete actions—acting on suggestions from employee surveys and reviews, for example, or increasing the budget for training and employee support programs—will help get things moving in the right direction.

Bottom line: If your employees are leaving cameras off en masse, it’s a great opportunity to uncover the bigger issues that might exist and get your employee engagement levels heading in the right direction.

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