Making workers turn their cameras on during Zoom or Teams calls could potentially be discrimination, an employment expert says.<\/p>\n
An employment tribunal in the United Kingdom has recently ruled that not letting a worker with anxiety turn off their camera during a meeting was a type of disability discrimination.<\/p>\n
Barrister and employment expert Barbara Buckett told Checkpoint forcing employees to have their cameras on in meetings did present a lot of issues.<\/p>\n
“As for this person it was overwhelming, the question is ‘camera’s on rights off’.”<\/p>\n
Buckett said employers needed to think about why they were making the request and if someone didn’t feel comfortable with it, was it reasonable for them to ask.<\/p>\n
In some cases, Buckett could see an argument for having cameras on in a meeting – including client meetings and team engagement – but it shouldn’t simply be a blanket policy.<\/p>\n
“People might not want an intrusion into their private space at home.”<\/p>\n
Buckett said she thought digital mediums like Zoom, Teams and Slack were causing concerns for workers as people often did feel less comfortable on them.<\/p>\n
“They’re quite intrusive and people feel like they’re on screen and they do feel it’s more invasive.”<\/p>\n
She said there were all sorts of reasons why someone may not be comfortable including cultural reasons, personal ones or even their living conditions.<\/p>\n
“I remember in Covid times we were in people’s bedrooms….I found that quite odd.<\/p>\n
“You can perfectly have constructive engagement without that camera on.”<\/p>\n
Another issue with video meetings was recording, Buckett said, and urged anyone to announce if a meeting was being recorded.<\/p>\n
“There has to be a legitimate reason for recording it. When you’ve got Teams for example, the person who has the invite, controls the availability to record it whereas on the other side you’re a bit sort of out in the cold.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making workers turn their cameras on during Zoom or Teams calls could potentially be discrimination, an employment expert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-540253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}