{"id":249426,"date":"2025-11-07T14:17:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/249426\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T14:17:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T14:17:15","slug":"smartphones-at-work-arent-the-problem-its-pointless-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/249426\/","title":{"rendered":"Smartphones at work aren\u2019t the problem \u2014 it\u2019s pointless meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is the first week of November, which means that along with most of the Christmas adverts being aired, journalists are already starting to write their round-ups of the year. Don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s only 49 days before supermarkets start pushing Cadbury creme eggs and we can moan about Easter being celebrated too early.<\/p>\n

I am halfway through writing a review of 2025, including an analysis of the top cultural moments. The most consequential TV show \u2014 one of those rare programmes that gets discussed both in parliament and at the pub \u2014 was Adolescence. Which, coincidentally John Lewis appears to be channelling with its angsty father-son Christmas advert.<\/p>\n

In the debate that raged following the harrowing drama (Adolescence, not the ad), many agreed that the culprit was not 13-year-old Jamie but smartphones.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Zadie Smith\u2019s top writing tip: put down your smartphone<\/a><\/p>\n

Once hailed as magical devices that could connect people, they are now being increasingly seen as responsible for many of society\u2019s ills, from diminished sleep to social anxiety. <\/p>\n

Now they are ruining office life, specifically meetings. That is the view of Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan Chase, who is fast becoming the Statler and Waldorf of Wall Street, with his grumpy pronouncements.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year he wrote in his annual letter<\/a> to shareholders: \u201cI see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop. It\u2019s disrespectful. It wastes time.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am not sure how he knows they are personal texts rather than another reminder from HR to complete the employee engagement survey. <\/p>\n

He is, though, far from the only boss to alight on the smartphone as the enemy of productivity and scourge of the office. Last week The Wall Street Journal wrote a fun piece interviewing various bosses, all of whom were fed up of having their underlings surreptitiously glance at their screens while they were being an Inspiring Thought Leader.<\/p>\n

Brian Chesky<\/a>, chief executive of Airbnb, said the company had a \u201cfester list\u201d: problems that plagued productivity. One was that too many Airbnb employees were not present in meetings because they were checking their phones. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge problem,\u201d Chesky said.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year I had a fun day in Paris, writing a piece for a travel section about Airbnb Experiences, the part of the website focused on tours, cooking classes or workshops rather than accommodation. I did a wine tasting, hosted by the charming Thierry Givone (he was great: five stars). By a genuine coincidence, he had had Chesky in as a guest the previous week. \u201cI had no idea who he was until some bodyguards came to inspect the shop an hour before. He seemed very nice but spent most of the time on his phone typing emails,\u201d Givone told me.<\/p>\n

So there we have it: bosses are like parents berating their kids at the dinner table for being on their screens, while answering a \u201cvery important\u201d message themselves. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Students \u2018will spend 25 years on their mobiles\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Many experts, however, agree with managers who would like to ban phones from meetings. Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens is chief people officer at SD Worx, which provides HR software to companies. He said: \u201cI believe in giving 100 per cent of your focus to the task or meeting at hand. We shouldn\u2019t be attached to phones and incessantly refreshing to get the latest messages, emails and WhatsApps, especially in work meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, no. But we should not stare out of the window or surreptitiously pick our noses in meetings, but some of us do. Too many meetings are just boring. We are only there because we were told it was important, not because it is useful. <\/p>\n

The issue is compounded when the meeting is online. When you have two or even three screens at home and the meeting is being conducted on one of them, how are you expected to ignore the incessant pings on Slack or the flood of emails? <\/p>\n

Dr Gemma Dale is a senior lecturer at Liverpool Business School. She made the point that many of us believe we are multitasking when answering a message during a meeting. \u201cBut of course, there\u2019s no such thing as multitasking. What we\u2019re really doing is switching very quickly from one thing to another.\u201d With that comes \u201cattention residue\u201d, when part of our brain remains thinking about the plumber or the email request after you have switched your attention back to the meeting. \u201cThat makes that meeting less efficient for every other person that\u2019s there,\u201d Dale said. <\/p>\n

That is true, but many of us treat our phones as a portable computer, invaluable in a meeting when we need to pull up a document, check a fact or schedule the next meeting. To ban phones would be like banning notepads and pens.<\/p>\n

The issue, of course, is not our phones; it is meetings. Not just that we have too many of them, but that too many of them are a waste of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a meeting is relevant and well run then people won\u2019t be distracted by their phones, pets, doodles, or anything else,\u201d Zena Everett, the author of The Crazy Busy Cure, said.<\/p>\n

A meeting, she points out, should be a place where people come together, either in person or virtually, to make a decision. It should not be a forum for transmitting information or, worse, a pointless team \u201ccatch up\u201d.<\/p>\n

When I was last made redundant from a newspaper I told a colleague that I was surprised, I had thought I was quite collegiate. They laughed and said: \u201cYou spent the whole time in our weekly meetings rolling your eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too many workplaces are not addicted to smartphones; they are addicted to meetings. Yes, we should not be secretly pinging messages to colleagues or rolling our eyes when the boss opens their mouth. But maybe if they could stick to the agenda, we would listen and put our phones away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is the first week of November, which means that along with most of the Christmas adverts being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-249426","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}