Phone call in meeting, interruptions?

Question

Hello

Can you help me by looking at this blog. I am doing a questioniare as part of a scientific experiment to find out what the fundamental psychological phenomenon is that causes people to collectivily decide not to answer a telephone call in an emergency.

This is the blog that I want you to just read for a couple of minutes...

http://exaltionism-sabretooth.blogspot.com

OK

What is your verdict to this problem and what is the answer if you have one?

CREED

Answer 1

i get irritated with people receiving or making calls/texts during meetings. etiquette should be to turn off cell phones during meetings and to use them only during rest room breaks. the implementation of "strictly no phone" policy during meetings would depend on the one presiding.

Answer 2

Here is my take on it.

Just as is it annoying to hear phones ring in a movie theater, so is it disrupting to hear them in a serious meeting. If you are anticipating a phone call of an urgent/emergency nature that you absolutely must answer, alert the person running the meeting, put your phone on vibrate, and sit as close to the door as possible to make a quiet exit.

If ther person running the meeting forbids any phones, even one on vibrate, alert a secretary or someone willing to accept a call for you. If you are paranoid and are always expecting an emergency call from anyone who has your number, then you could leave the ringer off and periodically check your phone from your purse/bag and look to see if you have a missed call. If so, politely excuse yourself and return the call outside of the room.

Unless you are an emergency responder (paramedic, fireman, doctor, etc.) most emergencies can wait the length of a meeting. If you don't fall into this category, and yet you routinely need to be "on call" then either find another job that will be more accomodating or wait until the meeting takes a break. If you still feel it is your right to have your phone when it is forbidden by your employer, then talk to a lawyer.

I personally think if you have your phone on vibrate, check the name of the caller, politely excuse yourself, and step outside before answering the phone... you should be fine. But, I still remember the day before cell phones when this was not an issue. What would you have done then?

Answer 3

just like in the olden days..you call the secretary or boss to ask to get an employee from a meeting for a true emergency.
911 hospitals police fire car breakdown etc involved...

it is not ok to have a cell phone on in a meeting. and if someones about to give birth or there is a known quality to a potential emergency word can be left in advance the staff may get a call.
orfro direct contact a page on the phone or pager works.

you leave the meeting to make and take even an emergency call.
that's, in my opinion, how it's done.

Answer 4

I had this situation years ago where my boss was at a meeting - not to be disturbed under any circumstances. His child was injured badly in an accident. He wouldn't pick up the phone. I barged into the meeting and got him. Job on the line or not, some things just have to be done. He was mad at first, but when he realized the nature of the call he settled down.

Answer 5

It's discouraging to put in a busy 10-hour day, yet feel that you haven't accomplished anything. From constant e-mails and phone calls to coworkers with quick questions that take all morning, it sometimes seems like the single most prominent part of work is interruption.



Well, you're right, probably more so than you realize. Gloria Mark, Ph.D., associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on work, researched workplace interruptions and came to a fascinating conclusion: We don't have work days -- we have work minutes that last all day.

Dr. Mark researches a number of work-related topics. Some are rather exotic -- designing and evaluating collaborative systems, for example, or developing and evaluating technologies to improve "virtual co-location." But much of it is the stuff that that affects everyday workers every day -- multitasking, human-computer interaction, workplace communities, offshore sourcing of knowledge work, why people really read e-mail ("From a cost-benefit point of view, in terms of worker time," she says, "e-mail does not pay off."). But in all her work, including her current Fulbright scholarship research in Berlin, she's uncovering truisms about the way work works, and how to make it work better.

Surprisingly, some of her discoveries are utterly counterintuitive -- for example, cubicle dwellers get interrupted less often, and people are as likely to interrupt themselves as be interrupted. Others confirm what workers have suspected for years -- for instance, if interruptions make you crazy, stay out of management. In this interview, Dr. Mark discusses how much time we really get to spend on work, what really is interrupting us, and why interruptions may actually be beneficial. But read fast -- the phone is going to ring any second now.

GMJ: Tell me about your research on work interruptions.

Dr. Mark: In our study, we observed for a half day, then we shadowed 36 managers, financial analysts, software developers, engineers, and project leaders for three days. We literally followed people around all day and timed every event [that happened], to the second. We defined an event as the amount of time that people spent in continuous uninterrupted use of a device or an interaction with other people. That meant a telephone call, working on a document, typing an e-mail, or interacting with someone who came into their cubicle.

What we found is that the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching was about three minutes. Actually, three minutes and five seconds, on average. That does not include formal meetings, because we figured if they were in a formal meeting, they were prisoners at the meeting, right? They couldn't leave or switch activities. So we didn't count that. Then we looked at [use of] devices, working on a PC, the desk phone, using any kind of paper document, using a cell phone. We found the average amount of time that people spent working on a device before switching was 2 minutes and 11 seconds.

You think you sit at your PC for a long time, but it's not true. You usually sit at it briefly before you switch to something else. You're interrupted by a person, by a phone call, or you do something on paper.

GMJ: How come this doesn't make us crazy?

Mark: I don't know. I guess the flipside is that somehow people are able to do this. That's what's remarkable.

GMJ: Doesn't getting yanked from one project to another destroy concentration?

Mark: That's what we wondered. We thought, okay, three minutes on any event before switching is maybe not so bad if it's the same project. So we took the events and assigned them into their associated projects. But we called it a "working sphere" because "project" has a limited connotation, and a working sphere is a broader idea. Anything where there's a common goal, there's a certain group of people involved with it, there are certain resources attached to it, it has its own time framework and its own deadline, is a working sphere. So we assigned these events to the working sphere, and then we measured how often people switched working spheres. Guess what we found?

GMJ: I bet that people weren't spending all day in a working sphere.

Mark: First, we found that each person worked on an average of 12.2 different working spheres every day. We also found that they switched working spheres, on average, every 10 minutes and 29 seconds. But then we thought, not all interruptions are the same. So we went through the data and removed all interruptions that were two minutes or less. Two minutes is fairly short time and for anything under two minutes, people should be able to go back and reorient to what they were doing. So even when we took out what we call "non-significant" interruptions, we find that people still worked 12 minutes and 18 seconds in a working sphere before switching.

GMJ: But were they switching tasks of their own volition?

Mark: Ah, that's a very good question! We looked at interruptions, and not all interruptions are the same. Some interruptions are from external sources. A person comes in, or your e-mail signal comes on, or the phone rings, or people chat through the cubicle wall to you. Those are external interruptions. But there are also internal interruptions; for whatever reason, people interrupt themselves of their own volition and switch to something else.

And what fascinates me is that people interrupted themselves almost as much as they were interrupted by external sources. They interrupted themselves about 44% of the time. The rest of the interruptions were from external sources.

Managers experienced far more external interruptions than internal interruptions. That was a significant difference. Managers have a huge network of people who come in and interrupt them. Analysts and developers are involved with a smaller network of people, so they have fewer external interruptions. But the fact remains that they still have a lot of internal interruptions.


I think this is annoying in a meeting!!