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20-Somethings Think It's OK To Text and Answer Calls In Business Meetings
RichDiesal writes "In an upcoming article in Business Communication Quarterly, researchers found that more than half of 20-somethings believe it appropriate to read texts during formal business meetings, whereas only 16% of workers 40+ believe the same thing. 34% of 20-somethings believe it appropriate to answer the phone in the middle of a meeting (i.e., not excusing yourself to answer the phone — answering and talking mid-meeting!). It is unclear if this is happening because more younger workers grew up with mobile technology, or if it's because older workers have the experience to know that answering a call in the middle of a meeting is a terrible idea. So if you're a younger worker, consider leaving your phone alone in meetings to avoid annoying your coworkers. And if you're an older worker annoyed at what you believe to be rude behavior, just remember, it's not you – it's them!"
Most of upper management is on their crackberry when anything remotely technical pops up in a meeting.
Maybe the young kids have just figured out what the older generations haven't, which is that meetings are often a life-draining waste of time? They could be answering their phones in passive-aggressive protest of being locked up wasting their time in a conference room. </snark>
Ignoring any potential objective effects, wouldn't it make more sense to state, "if you're an older worker, remember that they aren't trying to be rude?" And then, maybe to say something, instead of judging silently?
Basically the assumptions that the "correct" standard of behavior belongs solely to a certain group, and that others should be expected to be a priori aware of others opinions absent communication, are critically flawed.
.: Semper Absurda
Part of the list of things I go over with my new hires is basic business etiquette. I spend at least an hour per employee on it. The most annoying thing I find is people who have a mother/father/significant other who expect them to always answer the cell phone when they call it. My experience is that a lot of people we hire have never worked in a professional atmosphere before... I'm not sure if this is because of our hiring practices, or is because of the general habits of today's younger workforce. If I am in a meeting I scheduled, and someone my rank or lower answers their phone, I almost always immediately end the meeting, to be rescheduled later. I run meetings so as to waste the minimum amount of time required for everyone; I expect the same from others. The public shaming seems to work well at my current workplace.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Today, you usually know who's calling before you answer. It may be appropriate to take a call if it's more important than the meeting. If you're in sales, a call from a major customer is probably more important than a meeting. If you're responsible for something operational, a call from someone reporting trouble is probably more important than the meeting.
As for reading texts, if you're in a meeting and the current meeting activity doesn't involve you, it's an effective use of your time. This is more of a large-meeting thing. Large meetings are generally nonproductive anyway.
Do 20-somethings even know what minesweeper is?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I work in a fairly large technical sales environment, and we exercise a zero tolerance rule for our younger team members when we are out with clients - if you touch your mobile device for any reason beyond presenting content or sharing contacts relevant to the meeting, you will be reprimanded. Don't leave the device on the table, and don't even think about taking notes on your phone - anything that distracts you and forces you to break eye contact with your customer is a bad thing and makes you look like you're only half-interested in the people in the room.
We will occasionally experience some belligerence after they have been reprimanded, but we always remind them that the best, most seasoned sales team members only need four things to close a multi-million dollar sale - pen, paper, whiteboard, and business cards.
Young folks know that business meetings are usually not actually important. Most of the meeting is spent addressing other people's concerns or bragging about some piece of information that the presenter feels is important, but is only trivia to most of the audience. If there's anything else, like a text message, that is perceived as a better use of one's time, they're likely to pay attention to that, rather than the meeting.
Older folks would previously have just dozed off in meetings, or doodled on notebooks looking like they were paying attention. Now that older folks are likely to be the ones leading the meeting*, of course they feel slighted when their subordinates are devoting attention elsewhere.
Another contributing factor is that young folks are more often the expendable workforce. They're the ones who are getting the longer hours and heavier workloads, being taught through their short careers that handling two problems at once is a minimum. There's a good chance that text message is work-related, and not responding would be the greater offense.
* From TFA:
People with higher incomes are more judgmental about mobile phone use than people with lower incomes
...which indicates to me that the older ones are the managers. On a wider study, this assumption may be invalid, as different industries have more youth at the top, but it appears this study covered 200 employees at a beverage distributor for its initial phase, and it doesn't reveal how many were used for the second phase. Not much hope for demographic diversity.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
No, texting is not normal, it's rude and should not be done during meetings or classes unless it actually has something to do with the meeting/class itself.. You're at work/school, so you should leave the private stuff for lunchbreaks or after work.. If it's during my meeting I'll warn you once, if during the same meeting it happens again, I'll warn you twice, if it happens a third time during the same meeting, your mobile will become an UFO that'll crash.. People should just have some respect for others and work, and should know that private calls are not for businesshours unless there really is an emergency.. I pay you to work, not to spend your office hours on your socialmedia hub..
Bottomline, don't be a fucking Nazi.
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there. If that phone call is that important then get up and go outside. You don't sit in the meeting discussing something else.
It's called common courtesy and common sense. If you consider those two items such a burden, then obviously so are you to the organization.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
As a 20 something I'm eagerly waiting for these baby boomers to just retire so we don't have to deal with thier nonsense. There is nothing wrong with answering a text message in a meeting if your are not involved in the conversation and you don't disturb anyone else.
Here is my list of stuff that is rude that over 40s do that I wish would stop:
The actual paper, in PDF format, can be found here.
You aren't paying me anything. The company is paying me to do a job, and that job is what matters, not your self-important rambling about your findings that don't concern me. If my message helps gets the job done more than whatever you're talking about, then I'm really being paid to send that message, and you're the one being rude by wasting time with the meeting.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"It's just like the good old days when people didn't feel like they were entitled to bring their personal lives to work showed up at work to, well, you know, work.", he said, posting the comment to Slashdot in the middle of the workday.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Ok, I am a 30 something year old so I don't fit into either demographics...
However most of the time meetings are an out of date idea's. They historically worked because we didn't have a communication infrastructure that we do today. Conference phones where limited in the number of people on the line, issues with the person not being close enough to the phone to be heard and a slew of other communication problems, and before that it was very hard to get a bunch of people work on an idea, in a timely manner.
But really for most meetings, the individual doesn't need to be fully mentally involved unless there is something important to them. It would be much easier to chat via a message system, you can see the stuff go across your screen, while you work on something else, until something important comes up you can can then review what went on and come up with an appropriate answer.
the 20 somethings who grew up with this technology knows this and get very board during these meetings, as there is a lot of stuff that isn't important to them at the time that is going on. Now that said, It is still rude to disrupt the meeting with your activities, and if you are stuck at the meeting you should show some tact, but hopefully experience will clear that up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Meetings? Check. Texting/modern devices in the workplace? Check. "Get Off My Lawn"-type generalization? Check. This article's author included practically every white-collar-environment cause of rage. And judging by the butthurt-ness of most of the comments so far, the troll was eminently successful. The only thing that could have improved it would have been to specify American 20-somethings, to get cross-ocean flaming as well.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I work at a large 'Top Ten' company and I see this sort of thing from just about everyone who is under 60 (the older folk seem to doodle on notepads rather than play on phones). It doesn't matter if it's a manager or an intern, if there are more than a handful of people in a meeting you're going to see this. I get tired of hearing exchanges like this day in and day out:
Speaker: And what do you think about that Johnson?
Johnson: (playing on his phone) Huh? What?
Speaker: What do YOU think about this?
Johnson: (glazed look on his face) Umm... Can you repeat what you said? I didn't hear you the first time.
Meetings grind to a halt when this stuff happens. Not only is it rude to the speaker, but you waste everyone's time when they have to go through everything again. Everyone swears they can play on their phone and listen at the same time, but it doesn't work. I understand the occasional emergency call (my favorite was when we could hear the guy shouting "The babysitter is doing WHAT? Stop her before she gets out the door!". I still have no idea what that was about.) but your day to day activities (work related or otherwise) can wait until the meeting is over with. It's just common courtesy.
Actually, I'd suggest that one potentially very important thing may have happened. You just got fired for having a poor work ethic and not taking part of your job seriously enough to actually do it.
Good luck trying to collect unemployment benefits when the employer tells the employment bureau why they fired you... unless you are also prepared to lie to the bureau yourself and contradict their claim. And even if you did, the best that would happen for you is that your benefits would be delayed significantly, so you better have enough saved up to survive for without any paycheque for a couple of months while they investigate the claim.
You don't have to like every aspect of your job, but unless you are self-employed and can always afford to lose clients that are less than ideal, that doesn't mean you aren't still obligated to do the parts of your job that you might not like. And that includes meetings.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They are self-centered and everything is about them, and them only. Common courtesy and respect are gone in that generation..
Do that around me in the office and you are fired, or at the least off the project. Do it around me personally, don't expect to be a friend.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
More time spent paying attention even when you didn't think it was important may have paid off on spelling and grammar. "ideas", "were" limited, "fully involved mentally" (ok, that one is probably debatable), "The" 20"-"somethings", "bored"
That said, the road we've been going down for decades already, since even the 40-somethings were kids, is one of more and more stimulation, of lower and lower quality. A hundred years ago, kids likely had to invent their own games, or, if they had access, they could read. 40 years ago, it was TV. Today it's Facebook. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that we've been training ourselves to require constant stimulation, with no regard for how good it is. Or, rather, we've stopped learning how to just be quiet and focused on the here and now, no matter how "boring" it might be. It apparently is also a helpful skill for being respectful of those around you.
I turn 28 this december. I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.11, so yeah, I know what minesweeper is. :) Got to grow up with it.
I'm sorry, but that is largely a load of crap.
I have had to attend a great many meetings in my day that were entirely irrelevant to me, my job, etc. There was no reason for me to be there, other than the fact that a manager wanted me to physically be there.
Now, you can argue that I should not have to attend useless meetings, but the older generation is stuck on them and so we have little choice. That is not to say that no meetings have merit, of course.
Being able to sit quietly in an irrelevant meeting isn't actually a particularly useful skill in the rest of life, so I can hardly blame anyone for wanting something to do or some other distraction during them.
You may consider it impolite or disrespectful. I consider it disrespectful to make me waste an hour of my time because you feel the need to show your self-importance by calling unnecessary meetings and forcing people who have no need to go to them to be there.
On the other hand, doing what your boss asks of you, even when it's wasting your time in a useless meeting, is your job!
If the meetings prevent you from doing the useful part of your job, tell your boss. If not, sit there quietly, you're paid to take a break.
We're getting all of these conveniences and our society doesn't have the time to instruct people (kids especially) what is and isn't appropriate behavior. It's not just this. It's people taking snapshots of party goers doing something embarrassing, sexting, phone calls in theaters, etc. I was just at the coffee shop and a woman had one of those bluetooth headsets talking away while at the counter. Now, nothing is more annoying than standing next to someone when you can't tell if they're talking to you, the cashier, herself, or some hidden phone under their hair or on the opposite side of their head.
However, society hasn't had the time to say "hey this pisses other people off so just because it makes irrelevant 5 minutes conversations convenient, wait until you're in private to use this device."
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If you look at the actual polling they didn't differentiate people that actually attend business meetings or really define what qualifies as a business meeting.
If you look at how many 20-somethings are still in school, unemployed, under-employed, or just doing some type of non-office work you'll see that a business meeting is something completely different to them.
Most people on slashdot probably think of a business meeting as a project manager meeting with some technical people in an office meeting room, but most people aren't working in an office as technical people or project managers. A business meeting for someone that works as a waiter or cook at a restaurant could be the manager taking 5 minutes to talk about upcoming catering events in the morning before you start doing work.
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A meeting usually covers many topics, only some of which apply to most participants.
For example: The annual briefing at my workplace. I'm support staff at a school.
Summary of results? No interest to me. I'm not a teacher.
Health and safety briefing? This I need to know.
Fire evacuation plans? Half of it I need, the other half matters only to the fire wardens, of which I am not one.
The boss's boss's boss's boss's droneing motivational speech? I fell asleep last time.
Why are you in the meeting if you aren't going to pay attention to it? If you don't have the ability to focus on something for 30 to 60 minutes at the exclusion of all else, you shouldn't be given responsibility for anything.. Fuck I'm surprise you don't swallow your tongue when you try to eat. You don't have the mental discipline required for responsibility. You know why people go to a separate room for a meeting? You go there to meet because for that time period you are * not * fucking * available * for anyone else. You are available for those in the meeting. If that weren't the intention they wouldn't call the fucking meeting in the first place. And if you are not being asked something or speaking in the meeting, you are listening. Someone invited you there because you might know something that can help. And you can't help anyone in the meeting if you are not paying attention to it. You are just a sack of shit taking up space in the meeting room. Get your fucking head out of your ass. [/endrant]
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.