Glitches in Teams calls are costing you trust. You just can’t see it.

Ok, granted. Statistically that minor glitch in your last Teams call probably didn’t cost you a customer or relation. But recent research by Brucks et al. from Columbia University shows, that the impact of glitches on video call outcomes is much bigger than most of us suspect, and that it isn’t at all unlikely that a glitch is having more negative effects than you may realize.

And no, we’re not talking about fully broken up calls or completely buggy sessions. We’re talking about minor glitches of just a second or two that can already significantly change how the other person judges you or you judge them.

I’ve been working in digital collaboration for over twenty years. I was there when phone conferences over land lines were still novel, and video conferencing was just a distant dream.

One of my most frustrating memories of that era was having to run a software training for a team spread across Antwerp, New York, Brazil and South Africa…. By phone.

Not just because they couldn’t see what I was doing. Mostly because I couldn’t see them. I simply couldn’t tell if they were following or completely lost. And when two of the New York team members got into a full-blown argument with each other live on the call, one walking out with a door-slam I could hear across three continents, I was completely blind and unable to do a thing about it.

That door slam taught me more about collaboration than any training I ever got. Human collaboration runs on signals we don’t even consciously process. Facial expressions. Micro reactions. The slight shift in someone’s posture when they disagree but haven’t said so yet. Strip those away and you’re not just losing convenience. You’re losing the connective tissue that holds collaborative conversations together.

It’s probably why phone conferences never got the popularity video calls later would have. People kept meeting in person because nothing beats the ability to look each other in the eye.

Tools like Zoom, Webex and Teams revolutionized how we meet. Suddenly we could have that face-to-face without the hassle of finding a free meeting room or booking a flight. The pandemic then solidified what was already exploding onto the corporate market, into everyday life. Kids attended class virtually through Teams. Patients had Zoom video consultations. Families stayed connected through digital meetups. The result? Most of us now regularly have online meetings.

Is it the same as in person? No. But overall, it’s a solid replacement with the pros generally outweighing the cons. Less travel, less time, less physical space required. Worth the trade off.

Or so we thought.

Here’s where the research mentioned before becomes interesting. Seventy percent of people think glitches during video calls have little to no impact on how they evaluate the other person. The researchers tested this and found that that is a wrong assumption. Digital glitches in video calls play a big role in how we perceive the other person.

This underestimating of the impact of digital disturbances is not a new phenomenon. People’s stated tolerance for technical problems is almost never a reliable indicator of how those problems actually affect their behavior. I’ve seen this pattern countless times in software adoption work. Users say the tool is fine. Then you look at the data and see they quietly stopped using a feature three weeks ago.

The same mechanism is at work here. You think you’re being rational and fair. Meanwhile your gut has already filed the other person under ‘something was off about them’ and moved on.

When we think about what makes a video call go wrong, we tend to think about the obvious stuff. The call that drops entirely. The audio so bad you give up and switch to phone. The lag so severe that everyone talks over each other for ten minutes.

But that’s not what this research looked at.

It specifically tested minor glitches. Brief freezes. Fleeting moments where the video pixelates or the audio cuts out for a second. The kind of thing most of us shrug off before the call even ends.

And the results are genuinely surprising.

A freeze that lasts one to two seconds is actually often more damaging to how you are perceived than one that lasts longer.

Let me repeat that. The shorter glitch often does more harm.

The researchers tested this directly. Longer glitches scored higher on disruption. People noticed them more consciously and rated the call as glitchier. But it was the shorter, fleeting glitches that scored higher on what the researchers call uncanniness. And uncanniness, not disruption, is what drives whether you trust the other person.

It does make a difference what type of glitch it is. When it comes to video loss longer video loss also scores badly. Tying in directly with the fact that the part of ’seeing the other’ is key here.

This is where the research gets really interesting. And where I think a lot of organizations get it fundamentally wrong.

We assume a glitch bothers us because it disrupts the flow of the conversation. Or because we missed something that was said. Both of those things can happen. But they are separate problems with separate effects.

The research separates glitch impact into three distinct things:

And uncanniness is the one that does the real damage. Even when you understood every word. Even when the disruption was barely noticeable. That eerie, slightly off feeling bleeds directly into whether you trust someone, whether you want to work with them, whether you believe what they are telling you.

Remember those nineties sci-fi films where a seemingly normal face suddenly glitches to reveal the robot underneath? That image is closer to the truth than it might seem.

The research found that glitches only trigger uncanniness in calls where you are looking at someone’s face. When screen sharing was active and faces weren’t visible, the same glitches occurred but the uncanniness scores were significantly lower. Suggesting that the harm came specifically from the combination of a human face and technical disruption or as the research calls it: Social presence.

It is not the technical failure itself that does the damage. It is the broken illusion of human presence. Video calls work because they create the feeling of sitting across from another person. When a glitch shatters that feeling, even for a fraction of a second, something shifts. And it does not easily shift back.

To test this, the research looked at real world consequences across multiple contexts. Job interviews where glitches reduced the likelihood of a candidate being hired. Telehealth consultations where trust in the doctor dropped measurably if the call was glitchy. And perhaps most starkly, parole hearings where people on calls where glitches occurred were granted parole twelve percentage points less often than those without.

Twelve points. For a minor freeze. In a situation that determines someone’s freedom.

That is not a nuisance. That is a real, invisible impact on human outcomes.

This gets to something I feel strongly about. True digital collaboration success is only obtained when the human element stays intact and takes pride of place.

We don’t just sign contracts because the slides were good. We don’t like to follow medical advice from an AI. We don’t invest our money because the pitch deck was solid. For a large part, we decide those things because we trust the person presenting it to us.

This isn’t new. I once worked with an B2B importer where management wanted to replace the calls their sales team made to notify corporate customers of incoming orders with automated emails. It would save time. It was logical.

The sales team pushed back hard. And they were right to. For them, that innocuous call, simply telling a customer their order was on the way, was one of the rare chances they had to speak with a decision maker without immediately triggering a defensive response. No sales agenda. Just a human moment. That was where rapport was built. Where trust was quietly accumulated. Trust that could result in a favorable outcome during the next negotiations.

Automating wouldn’t have just changed the process. It would have removed the human signal and therefore that chance to build trust from the situation entirely.

Glitches seem to do something similar. They don’t block the information. They corrupt the signal that says this is a real person that you can trust.

Companies increasingly understand the importance of software like Teams, Zoom and Webex for their communication. But the prevailing assumption is still that as long as it performs well ‘most of the time’, it is good enough. Hit the uptime targets. Stay within latency thresholds. Keep packet loss below the acceptable percentage. Green dashboard, job done.

This research proofs otherwise.

A call can be technically within spec and still feel subtly wrong to everyone on it. The frozen face that lasted a second and a half. The audio that cut out just as someone made their key point. Even though it’s small, its impact can be massive. This is why organizations shouldn’t downplay the reliability of their collaboration software and invest in good user experience monitoring.  

A platform with high adoption numbers and quietly degrading call quality is not a success story. It is a slow leak as the cost of poor digital experience is not just measured in downtime. It is measured in trust lost, deals not closed, candidates not hired and patients who walked away with doubt instead of confidence.

Minor glitches. Major consequences.

That is not a network problem. That is a management problem. And it starts with deciding that good enough is not, in fact, good enough.