Multitasking During Meetings? How to Make Your Colleagues Indistractable

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written by Jenny Wood, an author, speaker, founder of Google’s popular “Own Your Career” program. She writes for the Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and her own blog.

When I moved from a Google sales team in New York City to a Google operations team in Boulder, Colorado several years ago, I expected to find differences in culture and team norms. But one particular practice took me by surprise. Multitasking during meetings was rampant. Everyone was so distracted.

This became grossly apparent during my first presentation in my new role.

The move had included a promotion: I had joined the leadership team in Boulder, and I had plenty of imposter syndrome. I was trying to prove myself — which is why I spent over seven hours preparing for my first big business review presented to my peers and manager.

As I presented my slides to half a dozen people in a corner conference room, my heart sank. My teammates occasionally glanced up at me, but mostly they spent the time managing their email inboxes. Even though the information I shared pertained to them, I barely had their attention.

Multitasking during meetings is common at most companies, but I’d never seen it as rampant as in this…