Sadly a lot of people don’t produce directly but do so indirectly. When they could been seen sitting at their desk clicking on something by everyone, everyone knew they were doing “something,” even though it was immeasurable (because it was often nothing). Without that ability to signal productivity they need to be seen in meetings on zoom. This isn’t fair of course, most jobs probably don’t legitimately have 8 hours of busy work attached but yet we expect them to work 8 hours. The jobs still important for the hours of actual work they put in. That’s not their fault, but they’re still left with figuring out how to seem like they’re working 8 hours when they are not and never were. The buying of their body in a chair was a proxy for that, and now they need to figure out how to make people see them sitting in a chair.

One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.