JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is bringing down the hammer on texting in meetings. But IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says a technology company shouldn’t discourage its employees from using their devices.
Checking our phones has become a popular habit, regardless of where we are. A Reviews.org study last year found that Americans pick up their phones 205 times throughout the day. That’s nearly once every five minutes from the time they wake up in the morning.
So it’s not surprising that the impulse has bled into the workplace. But some executives want to rehash meeting etiquette as it once was.
“If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing,” Dimon said to Alyson Shontell, Fortune editor-in-chief during its Most Powerful Women summit in October.
“This has to stop. It’s disrespectful. It wastes time,” he previously wrote on the subject in his April annual letter to shareholders.
But Krishna says there’s an important distinction to make. He says a larger meeting is “not really a meeting. It’s a communication vehicle,” and therefore shouldn’t merit managing attendees’ tech use. But gatherings of up to 10 people are different.
“If it’s a small meeting, I would really frown upon if somebody is sitting opposite my desk and lost in their phone, I would tell them, ‘Why don’t you come back when you have time?”
Although company leaders are getting fed up, it’s becoming easier and easier to multitask at work. AI assistants integrated into Zoom and Microsoft Teams can record meetings and feed employees a summary whether they were listening or not.
Still, Dimon may be onto something. While multitasking by name suggests getting two things done at once, research shows the human brain isn’t wired to do that. In fact, what’s really happening when people think they’re multitasking is that they’re continuously switching from one task to another.
The process takes even more mental energy than focusing on one task at a time.
“Every single time we switch there is a cost,” says Dr. Sahar Yousef, UC Berkeley cognitive neuroscientist. “It’s draining. It’s taking longer to do the same thing.”
As tech tools continue to improve, the temptation of using them to do two things at once grows stronger. But it may be in our best interest to pay attention to what’s in front of us, and save the rest for later.
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Ava Levinson
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