Phone Etiquette in Meetings

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We talk a lot on this show about etiquette.

And recently on our Facebook page, we asked this question.

Do you answer phone calls and read text messages during business meetings?

Boy, did that stir some debate.

A lot of strong feelings on both sides, right?

And we linked to an article that referenced a study that shows that 51% of 20-somethings believe it is appropriate to read text during formal business meetings, whereas only 16% of workers over 40 believe the same thing.

And some of the people were saying this on our Facebook page, that maybe it was an age difference.

It does seem to be a little bit age-graded, yeah.

Although I’m outside that.

I’m 43, and for me, I totally do that all the time.

Text messages, email, anything that comes in on the phone, it depends on the meeting.

It depends on what’s happening.

There’s a lot of a meeting that is actually technically downtime, right?

I do think that it depends on the context.

If I’m in a meeting, especially if you’ve invited people in that aren’t your regular core team or something,

With a larger group at your company or clients or something like that, that, I don’t know.

In that case, I think of texting as sort of like blowing your nose.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it might make me feel better, but I would most likely get up and leave to deal with it.

So context-specific for you, right?

Yeah.

Answering a phone is beyond the pale for me.

I would reject all calls.

But texting and something that’s silent, I would totally do.

That’s my question.

Depending on the meeting.

Depending on the meeting.

Yeah, yeah.

And what’s the difference?

Yeah, you nailed it.

The regular weekly meeting, I’m probably totally fine with that.

And as a matter of fact, most of the weekly meetings that I go to and the variety of things that I do here,

Half the room has their phone out next to their notepad because it’s part of doing business.

It’s part of recording things or checking an email or recalling a particular document that you have access to on your phone.

And you can actually contribute to the meeting.

Well, yeah, yeah.

There’s that risk of getting distracted, though, don’t you think?

Always.

The larger context that I see here on these responses is that there seems to be an understanding,

An unstated understanding by a lot of the people who prefer to use their phones during meetings,

That many meetings are unnecessary.

And that’s something else worth exploring, right?

Yeah.

There was the guy who said, what did he say?

Meetings are vortexes of uselessness and despair.

They are a thinly guised temporal vampire bent on ruining all productivity.

That was Andy McHugh on our page.

It’s so true in many cases.

And there are companies in the Bay Area where they think about processes as part of doing business where they eliminate meetings.

Or they do only stand-up meetings, which is you get one thing to say, one thing to ask, and then you’re done.

There’s that.

And then there are people like Julianne Fowler, who’s a 27-year-old graphic designer on our page.

She said, I think it’s about the rudest thing you can do besides fall asleep in a meeting.

Wow.

I mean, there’s quite a range of feeling about this.

I’d be interested to hear our listeners’ feelings about it.

And also that study that I referenced earlier was really interesting.

It showed that men nearly two to one think that texting during a meeting is fine compared to women.

Oh, interesting.

Isn’t that interesting?

I didn’t know it was gendered.

That’s very strange.

Fascinating stuff we’d love to hear your thoughts about this call us at 877-929-9673

Or step out of that meeting and send us an email words@waywordradio.org

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