You have probably suspected it—but now a FuzeBox study has confirmed it—a whopping 92 percent of employees are distracted and not always paying attention at meetings because they are “multitasking.”
According to a press release, 52 percent of survey respondents spend 1 to 3 hours in meetings weekly, and 34 percent spend between 4 and 10 hours in meetings.
Just what are they doing if not taking copious notes? Well, they admit to multitasking, but the bad news is that what they are doing is not always productive.
So, you have seen employees looking down or see their hands under the meeting table. Yes, they are texting—69 percent of study respondents check e-mail during meetings.
And 49 percent say they are truly multitasking—working on other projects unrelated to the topic of the meeting.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that 44 percent are (sometimes surreptitiously) eating!
FuzeBox finds the root of the distraction problem is a lack of face-to-face communication that holds employees accountable for information or actions derived from meetings. For example, 56 percent say they multitask most often on phone conferences, and that number drops to 16 percent during in-person meetings.
And how many are doing things totally unrelated to their work on their smartphones?