You can improve your meetings by telling people to leave smartphones and laptops outside.

Fed up with his staff constantly checking emails and alerts on their smartphones, Paul Devoy decided in September to ban all phones, tablets and laptops from meetings.

Consequently, the head of Investors in People, the UK body that sets workplace standards, says meetings have become much more productive as attendees are entirely focused.

The distracting pull of digital devices and the detrimental effect that has on our ability to concentrate is well documented. In one Stanford University study, people who regularly attend to electronic alerts and messages do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who concentrate on doing one thing at a time. It is not the technology that is at fault but our inability to manage it.

Mr Devoy introduced his ban on technology in meetings alongside sessions for staff on mindfulness, which he says helped to put this seemingly draconian ban into context and head off resistance.

“It is about unitasking, not multitasking,” he says. “People are quite happy to be given permission not to have their phones with them.” Exceptions are made if important personal calls are expected.

“These things need to be proportionate,” he says, adding he was surprised to find that his staff were receptive and some even enthusiastic about the ban.

Mr Devoy has gone a step further in his purge of technology. He has banned PowerPoint presentations from meetings, and finds that discussion now flows more freely.

Nena Chaletzos, chief executive and founder of online travel start-up Luxtripper, is also a convert to tech-free meetings. She runs her company’s weekly internal meeting without phones and laptops, and permits only the occasional video demonstration. Instead, for the one-hour meeting, her team of eight are asked to bring along the A3 whiteboard they have each been given, on which they write meeting notes and action points. At the end of the meeting, everyone’s actions for the week are agreed. The whiteboards are kept on show and tasks are rubbed off as they are completed.

“I tell them to bring their ideas and brains to the session, not their technology,” Ms Chaletzos says. Where once the meeting went on for three hours, discussion is now so much more focused and productive that it can be kept to a strict 60 minutes, she says.
At first, colleagues worried about customers being unable to reach them, but Ms Chaletzos told them that all they needed was a warning. An unexpected benefit, she says, is that meetings are much more friendly and open.

Technology is still very much used at the start-up but only at the right time. For example, Ms Chaletzos’s team uses Slack, which has helped end the need for other internal meetings.

While investors might raise an eyebrow at the idea of a digital start-up embracing old-fashioned whiteboards, Ms Chaletzos sees it as the future.

Source: http://goo.gl/89kVyY