Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going “topless”, as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend.
Meetings have never been popular in Silicon Valley. Over the years, companies have come up with innovative ways to keep staff meetings from sucking up time. Some remove chairs to force everyone to talk fast on their feet. Others get everyone to drink a glass of water beforehand.
But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than each other. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his “personal war against CrackBerry”.
His design company, Adaptive Path, strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague Dan Saffer, coined the term “topless” as in “laptop-less”. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with each other rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.
It’s not exactly attention deficit. Linda Stone, a executive who worked for Apple Inc and Microsoft Corp, calls it “continuous partial attention”. It stems from a desire to connect and be connected all the time, to be, in her words, “a live node on the network”.
The culprit: Etiquette has not kept up with technology, said Sue Fox, author of Business Etiquette for Dummies.
“Social norms say that the person you are conversing with takes precedence over text-messaging, e-mail, and cellphone. This rule applies in business as well,” Fox said. “Today, face-to-face meetings have become a low priority because they’re constantly being interrupted by technology, and many people can’t figure out what to do.”
Late in 2007, Jeremy Zawodny, who works with Yahoo Inc, attended his first “no laptops” meeting at the Sunnyvale Internet company. “I looked around in amazement that no one had their laptops open,” he said.
After attending a few such meetings, Zawodny blogged about it earlier in March. He felt conflicted about the policy. On the one hand, he says, he found meetings useless if colleagues divided their attention.
Not everyone feels the urge to unplug. Selina Lo doesn’t mind if her employees multitask in meetings. After all, the energetic chief executive of Ruckus Wireless, a Sunnyvale-based WiFi company, is a known workaholic. She says: “People are going to get distracted. It’s OK as long as it is not for an extended period of time. I get distracted myself. That’s just how meetings are nowadays.”
San Francisco event planning site Socializr Inc has only one meeting a week, during lunch. “That way, even if the meeting is a complete pointless waste of time, we still ate,” said company founder Jonathan Abrams.
Los Angeles Times
