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Last Words
Turn Off That Cellphone. It's Meeting Time.
By Maggie Jackson, The New York Times
02/03/2003
Tom Rotherham, the chief executive of the accounting firm RSM McGladrey, calls a halt to any management meeting there if a cellphone rings. He throws up his hands and demands $50 from the perpetrator.
"Everyone laughs, and I say: `I'm not kidding. Where's the $50?' " said Mr. Rotherham, who instituted the policy two years ago at the company, which is based in Bloomington, Minn. "If you want to disrupt your life, fine. But don't disrupt everybody else's."
Short of getting drunk at the office holiday party or whipping the boss at golf, there may be no faster way to anger a top executive these days than to let your cellphone trill during an important meeting.
And executives are cracking down on such interruptions, which they regard as both etiquette gaffes and as drains on time and money.
Although many companies require employees to carry cellphones on the road, they are also curbing their use in the office. Nearly 60 million Americans take cellphones to work, and use them for 4 of every 10 calls they make or receive on the job, according to IDC, a research firm based in Framingham, Mass.
"A cellphone has gone from a symbol of status to a device of scorn," said Ian Campbell, the chief executive of Nucleus Research Inc., a firm in Wellesley, Mass., that studies technologies' returns on investment.
When Mr. Campbell went on a top-level business trip to Vail, Colo., recently, he ordered his staff back at headquarters to send text messages to his cellphone rather than calling him. Otherwise, he said, "I would have been shunned by everybody in Vail." In three days of meetings with apparently like-minded executives, he didn't hear a cellphone ring once.
The cellphone revolution has ushered in daunting social challenges. In 1997, just 20 percent of Americans owned a cellphone, but 51 percent, or 143 million people, do today, according to the Gartner Group. No public place or event is safe from them, and efforts to rein them in — from glares of disapproval to outright bans — have had limited success.
In the workplace, however, senior executives have more influence, and some may be taking action because they're old enough to remember a quieter world. About 45 percent of people who are 45 and older say they are bothered by cellphone use in the office, compared with 28 percent of those aged 18 to 44, according to a 2001 Internet survey of 800 adults by the Consumer Electronics Association.
Gregory Fitzgerald, vice president for marketing at traq-wireless Inc., a company in Austin, Tex., that tracks mobile-device use within corporations, says 30 percent of his firm's 85 Fortune 1000 clients have policies on such devices. "Companies are trying to balance the competitive advantage of mobile communications with the disruptions and annoyances" associated with them, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
At RSM McGladrey, some mobile workers are issued cellphones, and all employees are taught that responding to clients quickly is paramount. Still, Mr. Rotherham does not contend that cellphone intrusions are good business. "It gets back to two issues," he said. "One is efficiency and the other is rudeness."
He said he collected $150 from cellphone scofflaws during the first year of his policy; the money was used to buy a managers' lunch. Nothing was collected the second year.
"I don't know how you can get any work done if you're always on call," said Mr. Rotherham, who carries a cellphone only when he travels. "At what point are you so connected that you become disconnected?" His $50 fine technically applies only to meetings of the firm's seven senior managers or 35 firm managers, or those at which he is present. But his unwritten policy has influenced the firm, as Deborah Ely Lawrence, its director of corporate communications, found last July during her first month on the job.
When her cellphone rang during a high-level management meeting, she recalled, participants booed and shouted, "Fine her $50!" Later, a colleague quietly advised her to keep her phone on vibrate during meetings.
"Sometimes now, I say to people that I may be getting a call," said Ms. Ely Lawrence, who was forgiven her first transgression. But, not, she added, "if I'm going to be in a meeting with my manager."
Employees grumbled and laughed in 2000 when Alan Goldsworthy, chief executive of Applix Inc., a software maker in Westborough, Mass., instituted a $5 fine if a cellphone rang during a meeting and $1-a-minute fine for being late to one. That year, he collected nearly $900 from the policy for a local group that supports abused women. Last year, he collected just $60.
"I accomplished what I was trying to accomplish," said Mr. Goldsworthy, who has paid fines for tardiness but none for cellphone infractions. "I was trying to get people focused on what we were doing."
Will restrictions work? Some workplace experts have their doubts. "It's sort of the wild, wild West thing, saying you can't bring your guns into the bar," said Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist for the Context-Based Research Group in Baltimore, which does ethnographic research for corporations. "What's really needed is helping people to learn to use these technologies."
And as more wireless devices spread through offices, cellphones aren't the only distraction. By 2010, half of office workers will carry two or more wireless devices, according to the Gartner Group.
Sometimes, silent devices can be just as distracting as beeps and rings, as Mark A. Stiffler, chief executive officer of Synygy Inc., found recently. Mr. Stiffler has been so strict about banning cellphones from the offices of Synygy, a software and consulting firm he founded in Conshohocken, Pa., that mobile-phone users now step outside, pariahlike, with the smokers. But a month ago, when the workplace turned wireless, Mr. Stiffler found himself back to Square 1. "It was becoming an issue that people were sitting in meetings with their laptops on and doing e-mail," Mr. Stiffler said. "We just instituted a ban on using your laptop in a meeting. Someone has to set the standard."
Read the full article at The New York Times
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