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When Screens Sit Between Colleagues Who Sit Together

Colleagues share a table but each faces a laptop, answering the queue that will not wait. Why meetings lose their people, and what gives presence back.

Mellorca Moments2026-10-03

The weekly meeting starts at nine. Six people sit around one table in the same room. Each has a laptop open. The person speaking looks up from her notes and sees the backs of six screens and the tops of six heads.

Nobody is being rude, exactly. One person is answering a supplier who needs a reply before ten. Another is approving a quote. Another is keeping an eye on a customer chat. Everyone is listening, more or less. And everyone is somewhere else, more or less.

It is an ordinary scene in many offices. It is also a curious one. People who share a room, and who could have each other's full attention for an hour, choose to split it with a queue. This piece asks why, and what changes when they do not have to.

What the evidence shows

Microsoft's Work Trend Index has tracked how people use meetings. In its report on hybrid work, it found that in an average week, 42% of meeting participants multitask by actively sending an email or a chat message during a meeting. The same report noted large increases in the number of meetings and in double-booked meetings since the pandemic.

A peer-reviewed study by Microsoft researchers, published as a large-scale analysis of multitasking during remote meetings, combined telemetry from US Microsoft employees with a diary study of 715 people. It found that multitasking was related to features of the meeting itself: its size, length, time of day and type. Larger and longer meetings saw more multitasking. The researchers also found that multitasking could have both positive and negative effects, which is an important qualification.

Both sources focus mainly on remote and hybrid meetings and on one company's tools and staff. They do not directly measure what happens in a South African boardroom where everyone is physically present. But they establish two useful points: multitasking in meetings is common, and it is shaped by how meetings are designed, not only by individual habit.

The same Microsoft report also found that people value connection with colleagues. When asked what would motivate them to come into the office, 84% cited socialising with co-workers and 85% cited rebuilding team bonds. Being in the same room, it seems, is something many people want. Being present in it is another matter.

Why the screens stay open

Consider an illustrative case: a Cape Town marketing and print business with about twenty staff. Every Monday, the managers meet for ninety minutes to go through every live job. Much of the meeting is status: what stage each job is at, what is waiting on the client, what is due this week. Meanwhile, client emails and chat messages keep arriving, and the business's culture expects quick replies.

In that setting, the open laptop is a rational response to two pressures:

  • The meeting is a status report. When most of the time is spent reading out information that could be seen elsewhere, people only need to pay attention when their own jobs come up.
  • The queue does not pause. If client messages must be answered within the hour and nobody else is covering, stepping away for ninety minutes feels risky.
  • The meeting is too big and too long. The research suggests these are exactly the conditions under which multitasking rises.
  • Status lives in people's heads. If job status is not visible in a shared system, the meeting becomes the only place to collect it, which keeps it long.

That last cause is one Mellorca has explored in when a status update requires a staff member to investigate and when the weekly report is already out of date. The always-on queue connects to the interruption costs described in the cost of messages, notifications and context switching.

The human tax: presence

The cost here is not mainly measured in hours. It is presence: the ability to give the people in the room your full attention, and to receive theirs.

Some of what is lost may be small. A joke that lands on half the table. A concern raised quietly that nobody quite registers. A colleague who has had a hard week and is not asked about it. It would be wrong to claim that these moments are always lost when laptops are open, or that everyone feels their absence. Some people prefer meetings that are efficient and impersonal, and some genuinely concentrate better with a screen in front of them.

But it is reasonable to infer that when colleagues spend their shared time half-attending, some of the value of being together is given up. And the reason it is given up is often structural: the meeting was not designed to need full attention, and the work outside it was not designed to wait.

What could change

The interventions sit on both sides of the meeting.

  1. Take status out of the meeting. If job status is visible in a shared board or system, the meeting can focus on decisions, problems and people. It will usually be shorter.
  2. Make the meeting smaller. Invite the people needed for the decisions, and share notes with everyone else.
  3. Cover the queue. Agree who watches client messages during the meeting, so others can step away from them with confidence.
  4. Set expectations on response times. If a reply within two hours is acceptable, nobody needs to answer during a one-hour meeting.
  5. Agree when screens are useful. A shared screen for the board, one person taking notes, and laptops closed otherwise is a reasonable starting point for discussion, not a rule to impose.

In the illustrative print business, moving job status to a shared board, cutting the Monday meeting to forty minutes on exceptions and decisions, and having one person cover client chat during it might be enough for most laptops to stay closed without anyone being told to close them.

Trade-offs

  • Screens have legitimate uses. Notes, reference documents and accessibility tools all need a device. Blanket bans can work against people who rely on them.
  • Some people focus better with a screen. Presence does not look the same for everyone.
  • Norms can become policing. A rule about laptops enforced with disapproval can damage the connection it aims to protect.
  • Smaller meetings can exclude. People left out of a meeting may feel less informed or less valued, even if the notes are shared.
  • Someone still covers the queue. The person watching client messages gives up their own presence in the meeting, so the role should rotate.

Why it matters

The business outcomes are familiar: shorter meetings, faster decisions, and fewer things missed because people were half-listening. The human outcome is harder to put on a report.

When colleagues who sit together can actually be together for the time they share, something is returned that technology cannot easily supply: the chance to notice each other. The dividend in this moment is presence. It does not come from removing laptops by decree. It comes from designing meetings that deserve full attention, and work that can wait an hour while people give it.

Sources and further reading

Related Mellorca reading

Article summaryColleagues share a table but each faces a laptop, answering the queue that will not wait. Why meetings lose their people, and what gives presence back.
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