Everyone Gets the Same-Sized Square: How Virtual Negotiation Redistributed Power

There is a quote from my interviews that I find myself coming back to. While it sounds like good news, it’s only half the story. One participant, a commercial director with three decades of experience across various European markets, described the change in this way:

“Virtual meetings level the field, everyone has the same-sized square.”

Although he is right regarding the square, he is wrong in that the field is level. What my doctoral study discovered across sixteen interviews conducted with senior negotiators is that the visible architecture of hierarchy collapsed literally within a day or so, and a second architecture assembled itself in its place. The latter is harder to see; this is what makes it worth writing about.

What the Screen Actually Removed

Status, in a physical negotiation, is announced prior to anybody speaking. Seat arrangements, who enters last, who occupies the head of the table, who is deferred to when two individuals start a sentence simultaneously: all is read instantly and to a large degree subconsciously. Videoconferencing removed most of these signals and replaced them with a grid of identically sized rectangles.

Participants described the effect consistently and on the whole, positively:

“It’s harder for senior people to dominate when everyone’s behind the same camera frame.”

“The boardroom hierarchy disappears; presence now comes from tone and pacing, not titles.”

“When everyone’s on screen, titles matter less, it’s your preparation and clarity that give you authority.”

Another participant put the consequence plainly: “In a room, people defer to the highest title; online, ideas count more.” Junior and more silent team members are more productive, and they are heard not on their position but on what they say. This is a genuine gain, and is consistent with the affective to cognitive trust transition that I described in “Why Trust Is Harder to Build on a Screen”. The position of authority that used to be bestowed upon a person by the room is now gained by competence.

The experimental literature confirms the mechanism, but with more nuance than the enthusiasm usually allows. A 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior Reports found that camera angle changed perceived power only when both parties were visible; when one camera was off, the effect vanished altogether.¹ Status signals in video are real, but they are fragile and conditional. They are based on the agreement of everybody to be seen.

The Three New Power Plays

That condition is exactly what negotiators learned to withhold.

The first play is the camera. Some of the participants identified camera-off behaviour to be a purposeful tool instead of a technical inconvenience:

“If someone keeps their camera off, it creates imbalance, you can’t read them, and it shifts the energy.”

“Camera-off is the new way to hide behind hierarchy, you decide when to appear.”

The asymmetry is the point. One party is legible and the other not, which recreates the informational advantage that the old boardroom conferred by seniority. It also carries a price, which the individual who resorts to it hardly sees: a 2025 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology established that switching off the camera has a negative impact on the reputation of the person who does it, measurably.² It is a tactic that buys concealment and spends reputation, which is not a good trade in a negotiation you are likely to engage in again.

The second play is facilitation. One of them remarked:

“Whoever controls the document controls the story, it’s power through facilitation.”

Whoever shares the screen determines the order of appearance of the issues, which version is to be authoritative and who will write the summary that will be the record. Physically, in a room, this was clerical work and tended to be delegated downwards. On the screen it is the agenda itself. One other respondent shared the same thought more structurally: “Power now comes from who manages the flow of information, not who sits at the head of the table.”

The third play is fatigue, and it is the one almost nobody negotiates against deliberately. The Scientific Reports article by Masjutin et al. (2024) discovered in two preregistered studies that fatigued individuals were more likely to conform to the majority in online meetings, but the use of cameras did not predict conformity or fatigue.³ The mechanism is depletion, not the interface. Look at what I argued in “Zoom Fatigue Is Real”, the implication is uncomfortable: the party that makes the fourth call of the day is not only tired, but they are literally more likely to agree. Scheduling has turned into a lever of influence.

What Competent Negotiators Do About It

Three practices emerge from the participants who navigate this well.

They consider visibility as a bargained convention, but not an individual choice. Agreeing on the cameras on both sides at the beginning and explaining the reasons eliminates the asymmetry prior to any of the parties taking advantage of it, and costs nothing when both parties are acting in good faith.

They claim the document. By volunteering to hold the shared agenda and to circulate the written summary, it reads as administrative generosity and functions as agenda control. If the counterpart insists on holding it, that too is information worth registering.

They protect the condition of their own attention. Recovery time turns into preparation and not a wellbeing concern, in the same category as the systematic analysis I argued for in “Your Gut Is Lying to You”. A depleted negotiator concedes on the merits of nothing.

A Final Thought

The flattening is real, and it is worth defending. The ideas now travel further on their merit than on the name they bear, which is a superior system to that which it has superseded. But power did not leave the negotiation when the boardroom did. It migrated to visibility, to facilitation, and to whoever is least exhausted at four in the afternoon.

The negotiators who continue to believe that the same-sized square means an even contest are the ones being quietly outmanoeuvred by colleagues who understand exactly what it does not mean.

Thanks again, Tim H.

@misc{herglotz2026dn08,
  author       = {Herglotz, Tim},
  title        = {{Everyone Gets the Same-Sized Square: How Virtual Negotiation Redistributed Power}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {7},
  number       = {8},
  howpublished = {Tim Herglotz, entry № 08},
  url          = {https://timherglotz.com/everyone-gets-the-same-sized-square-how-virtual-negotiation-redistributed-power/}
}