Working from home. It used to be great and still is for many of us, but there's a canary in the coal mine that's emerging that could take the joy out of your sweats/PJs/hat game.

That thing? It's called video meetings. And it's increasingly required for the simplest of calls you need to take.

The trend is positive. When you're working remote, you can take phone calls and be pretty absent, especially on conference calls when your full attention isn't required.

Video changes that - if people can see you, the ante of attention is raised significantly. That generally leads to better meetings and better relationships between remote workers and people in physical offices.

Of course, even if you're all in on video as a remote employee, things can go horribly wrong.  Check out the video below of a guy working from home being interviewed by the BBC, then the kids break in, then the wife comes screaming around the corner and starts jerking kid's arms. 

I'll give you my own story on that.  I'm on a video call from my home office one Friday with 4 other team members at Kinetix.  I heard the door open and thought my wife would get the message that I'm on a video call with 4 other people.  You know, the fact that my 32-inch monitor had them blown up on the screen, etc.

As it turns out, she understood what was up. Yet she needed something off the printer, so she proceeded to crawl behind me, only to be caught in the video frame crawling Marine style to get whatever document off the home office printer that couldn't wait.

My team?  Yeah.. they saw her crawling. There was laughter. Discomfort. Awkwardness.