Effective Non-Verbal Communication Online

There is something solid, with an important limit on it. The most cited account is Bailenson's, which sets out four reasons the standard video call layout is tiring: faces held at an unnaturally close distance for long stretches, the mental work of producing and reading nonverbal cues through a small frame, constantly seeing yourself, and being pinned into one spot inside the camera frame.

The limit is that the author says plainly these are arguments from existing theory and research and had not yet been tested directly in this setting. So treat them as a good explanation to work from, not as a proven mechanism.

The survey work that followed is more directly useful for this project. In a large sample, about one in seven women reported feeling very or extremely fatigued after video calls, against about one in twenty men, and the difference was largely explained by mirror anxiety, meaning discomfort at seeing your own face throughout. Feeling physically trapped by the call was the other strong predictor.

That turns into two small changes worth making at the start of a session: hide your own self-view and tell her how to hide hers, and say out loud that she can turn the camera off or stand up and move without it being rude. Both cost nothing.

Turning off self-view helped me immediately. What about reading the mentee? Half the time I cannot tell whether a pause means she is thinking or the connection dropped.

Stop trying to read it and start asking. On a video call a pause carries almost no information: it can be thinking, a bad connection, translating in her head, or someone walking into the room. Guessing wrong in either direction is costly, so name it. Something as flat as, I am not sure if you are thinking or if my connection froze, works fine and nobody finds it rude.

Two other adjustments. Leave longer gaps than feel natural before filling a silence, because a person composing a sentence in a second language needs more of them than the medium invites. And where the connection is poor, prefer audio over insisting on video: a stable voice carries more than a stuttering face.