Meeting Etiquette - Should you take mobile phones into a meeting?
This questions tends to generate a lot of diverging opinions, here are some of the more obvious ones to help you make this decision.
According to Digital Age, “There are countless netiquette sources that say it's rude to take a mobile phone call in a meeting, and you should turn your phone off. But this advice dates to when phones were used to make calls. Now you could be checking e-mail or sports scores, or you could be checking something relevant to the meeting on the web or taking notes.”
So should you or shouldn’t you? Here are some points to consider this further:
- How would you feel if you were hosting a meeting and someone was more attentive to their phone and not at what you were saying?
- If you get caught with using your mobile, it could be an embarrassing situation! What about those times when it wasn’t on the silent mode?
- Ask yourself this question – do you really need that phone or are you just doing it as a habit?
Now consider that you are attending an online meeting, would the advantage of not being in the same room as the presenter change your decision to carry to phone to the meeting?
Remember - if it is a web conference, there are web cams operating and your boss might actually notice that you are distracted or that you are not actively participating in the meeting.
It might also be worthwhile to think of how a mobile phone ringing might break the thought flow of the presenter and cause a disruption in the meeting for all the people in the conference.
While it might not be a good idea to tweet in your meeting, you can definitely tweet to us about your decisions (@ExpressVM) so we can share your thoughts with others who are considering good meeting etiquette.