Should meetings be a texting-free zone?

Some top CEOs are raging about employees texting in meetings. Others hold different views

HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS earned themselves a few unlikely allies in the perpetual battle against texting in class recently, with a couple major business names — Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon — coming out in the press to gripe about texting.

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“This has to stop. It’s disrespectful. It wastes time,” said Dimon (doing his best impression, I imagine, of my grade 12 economics teacher Mr. Delaney). The issue was not only included in his annual investor letter, but also in keynote speeches he’s been delivering. At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, for example: “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing!” he said.

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Brian Chesky, at least, was somewhat more self-reflective. “It’s a huge problem,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I text, but then people see me text, they text. This is a major societal problem.”

Is it, though? Is texting in meetings really a major societal problem, or is this just another something that sends certain Boomers into a tailspin? While there is plenty of robust evidence that distractions are distractions, those more in tune with the day-to-day realities of the average employee may be inclined to roll their eyes.

“People use their cellphones for all types of meaningful information today,” said Bob Chapman, chairman of capital equipment and engineering solutions firm Barry-Wehmiller and author of leadership book Everybody Matters. “It never occurred to me to tell people not to use their cellphone in a meeting.”

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Maybe then, it’s more helpful to turn the tables back on Dimon and Chesky: If people are texting, maybe your meetings are boring. That’s the lesson here for recruiting CEO Andy Decker, who has his colleagues text him when meetings are growing stale.

“A text can be helpful,” Decker said. “Like, ‘Don’t get in the weeds on this one, you’re losing people.’ It makes the meetings better because we allow that.” Kieran Delamont