Disrespectful.” That’s the word Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, has used to describe his employees’ behaviour in meetings. Why? Because they’re frequently reading personal texts or scanning emails, he noted in his annual letter to shareholders: “I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop ... It wastes time.”
Instead, Dimon stressed the need to “make meetings count”, reports The Times, highlighting that he always gives “100 per cent of [his] attention”.
As much as I’d like to hate on “The Man” and stir a grassroots uprising among the workers at America’s largest bank against their corporate overlords, there’s just no getting around the fact that this request – that staff be present and focused, not constantly tapping away on laptops or distracted by phones – is about as far from unreasonable as it’s possible to get.
It’s strange to read Dimon’s words and be confronted by just how much office life has changed over the past five years. Even as I’m agreeing with him, I’m struggling to remember the last time I went into a meeting and sat for the duration, whether it be 15 minutes or an hour, without checking Slack; refreshing Instagram; reacting to a friend’s WhatsApp with an appropriate emoji; scanning my emails; pinging off message after message after message across the multiple platforms I have open on my devices at all times. It feels acceptable only because I am rarely alone in this endeavour; I’m usually in a room surrounded by other people doing likewise.
But when did being so woefully inattentive become standard practice? When did the most basic tenets of office etiquette become irreparably eroded? When, in short, did we collectively forget how to behave at work?
Arguably our decline in manners can be traced back to the insidious rise of smartphone use and, subsequently, dependency. When I first started an office job at 22, the idea of having my mobile out at work was unthinkable. No one ever explicitly said it wasn’t allowed – there was simply an “understanding” about these things. You kept it in your handbag, checked it at lunchtime, and then back in the bag it went until home time. Work time was work time; you might have to take a specific personal call once in a while, but that was the exception, not the rule.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the lines between personal and professional began to blur. Was the rapid-pace growth of social media to blame? The switch from texts to online messaging services like WhatsApp, with the latter making us come to expect – and feel pressured to deliver – instant replies?
Whatever the reason, we’ve slowly but surely become a nation of device addicts. Leave it in the bag? Ha! We can barely leave our smartphones at our desk when we go to the loo.
According to Ofcom research published last year, the average Briton spends four hours and 20 minutes online on their phone every day, jumping to over six hours for those aged 18-24. A separate study by HR Review revealed that 60 per cent of Brits can’t go an entire workday without checking their mobile. A third of respondents said they check their phone every time a notification pops up; 17 per cent confessed to doing so multiple times per hour. And yet the only really shocking thing about these numbers is the idea that 40 per cent of us are managing to get through the nine-to-five without looking at a personal device. What kind of insane, herculean willpower must these people possess? Honestly, I call bullshit.
The slow death of analogue note-taking – relying on a good old-fashioned pen and paper, for example – was another nail in the coffin for distraction-free meetings. Most of my colleagues have their ideas or discussion points recorded digitally, so that they have no choice but to have a device to refer to. Once it’s there in your hand, of course, so is the temptation to quickly respond to that email, give your mate a thumbs-up icon, start scrolling through the social feeds and never stop...
And then, of course, there was Covid. I’d wager that the pandemic was the true culprit when it came to moving the goalposts of what constitutes work-appropriate behaviour. How could it not when, for many workers, office life became home-office life overnight? It was a huge cultural shift, and one of the biggest differences was meetings.
The pandemic was the true culprit when it came to moving the goalposts of what constitutes work-appropriate behaviour
While the ascendance of video call tech was a necessary stand-in for the real thing during lockdowns, engagement plummeted. After the initial novelty had worn off, half the time colleagues wouldn’t even bother to turn their camera on or unmute themselves. Entire Zoom or Teams meetings felt like speaking into the void. On the racier end of the spectrum, I even heard more than one anecdote during peak-pandemic times about employees who were, ahem, “getting lucky” during camera-off Zoom calls (their colleagues mercifully remaining none the wiser). Talk about distracted.
Even the faces that did deign to make an onscreen appearance were often vacant, distracted, eyes flicking hither and thither. It was common knowledge, if not provable, that every attendee was simultaneously working on several other tasks, with the “meeting” serving as little more than audible wallpaper. According to one poll of 1,000 participants, 80 per cent owned up to zoning out more in virtual meetings than in person, with 86 per cent admitting to texting and 75 per cent doing other work at the same time.
Science backs up this lack of participation. One study published in the journal Imaging Neuroscience revealed that staring at another person’s face via a computer screen prompts lower levels of certain brain activities and social arousal compared with seeing them in real life.
All this set a dangerous precedent. We may have returned to the office but we never quite returned to the pre-wfh mentality. Younger Gen Z employees had no frame of reference to begin with, having experienced their first taste of the working world as fully remote employees. How could they be expected to know that scrolling through TikTok while someone’s standing in front of you giving a financial presentation is different to doing it unseen over a conference call?
As for the rest of us, though we’ve not got anywhere near as good an excuse, our bad behaviour is nevertheless understandable. The move to home and hybrid working also precipitated the move to a constantly “on” culture, one in which we’re always contactable and notifications distract us a hundred times a day. Multitasking across endless platforms and flitting between tasks and tabs like an ever-buzzing horsefly, unable to settle anywhere for too long, has become the norm.
We don’t check our Slack during a meeting because we’re rude. We do it because the compulsion to keep our brains and fingers busy at all times feels overwhelming; we do it because we feel guilty about “not doing enough” the second we stop, focus, and give someone our full attention; we do it because we can’t not do it.
JP Morgan isn’t wrong. Our office etiquette needs some serious work. But the problem goes much deeper than checking Outlook during the Monday morning catch-up – and company culture will need a bigger overhaul than leaving your phone at your desk to overcome it.
Heart failure warning as people told not to ignore surprisingly common symptom
Harry at second day of appeal after court told he ‘felt forced to step back’: Live
Aldi urgently recalls product after issuing ‘do not eat’ warning
Gwyneth Paltrow fans shocked as actor’s husband makes rare online appearance
Esther Rantzen delivers heartbreaking health update about her terminal cancer
Reverend Richard Coles reveals surprising birthday present to himself
