ThemeMeetings & collaboration
CardCard 10 of 65
Questions5 to explore

Multitasking

Handle multiple conversations, tools & tasks

Remote participants are rarely fully in the meeting because the meeting is rarely the only thing on their screen.

Multitasking in meetings is nearly universal on hybrid teams, and it is almost never talked about honestly. Someone joins a video call, keeps one eye on chat, handles an urgent message, and is technically present for the whole thing. The in-room participants may not notice. The remote ones do it too, but they are more visible to each other.

The problem is not that people are rude. It is that the meeting format often does not justify full attention, or the notifications are too loud to ignore, or both. A team that names this honestly can start to fix it: either make meetings worth the attention they ask for, or acknowledge they are ambient and structure them accordingly.

Some multitasking is fine and human. What hurts a team is the silent contract where everyone performs attentiveness while actually doing something else. That wastes the meeting and leaves no one certain what was decided or who is accountable for what.

Make it explicitAgree on your team's norm for multitasking in meetings: what level of parallel work is acceptable in which types of calls, and how you signal when something needs full attention.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Design for the attention you can get

Teams that acknowledge multitasking happens can design meetings for it: shorter, tighter agendas with explicit 'full attention' moments for decisions and 'half-attention fine' sections for updates.

Notification discipline as a shared practice

The strongest hybrid teams treat notification settings as a group conversation, not a personal preference. Agreeing on 'do not disturb' during focused sessions reduces the pull of parallel tasks.

Visible action tracking keeps people honest

When someone captures actions in a shared doc during the meeting, attendees who drifted can re-engage quickly without derailing the conversation to recap what they missed.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

How much of a typical meeting are most team members actually present for, if you were being honest?
Which of your meetings genuinely require full attention from everyone, and which ones do not?
What makes it hard for remote participants to stay present in your current meetings?
Has your team ever talked openly about multitasking during calls, or is it an unspoken thing?
What would need to change about your meetings for people to want to give them their full attention?

Watch for

Repeating things for people who were not paying attention rewards multitasking and punishes the people who were present: it lengthens the meeting for everyone.
Remote participants who multitask because the meeting does not feel relevant to them are giving you useful signal. That signal is easy to miss if multitasking is never discussed.
In hybrid settings, in-room participants often cannot tell who is engaged and who is not on the video grid. Decisions can pass without the people who need to act on them actually registering them.