Why Conference Calls Aren't Always Productive

When you're on a conference call, do you ever get the sense that some participants seem distracted—or even mentally MIA? There's a good reason for that, as more than four out of five employees admit to working on unrelated tasks while on a conference call, according to a survey  from InterCall. It's especially easy to do this while off-site on a smartphone, which may be why 64 percent of the workers surveyed prefer to join conferences via a mobile device. To provide some insight into what's really going on during conference calls, InterCall presents the following most common ways that professionals distract themselves on call. As a bonus, InterCall has come up with a list of the oddest places from which employees have taken part in a call. "As the workplace has changed thanks to new conferencing and collaboration tools, so has the way employees communicate with their co-workers and clients," according to the report, "Out of Office … Sort Of." "Being at work doesn't necessarily mean being at the office. The same can now be said for attending work meetings. Since nearly every employee has access to a smartphone or tablet, meetings can be taken from home, the beach, an airport—pretty much anywhere employees find themselves." More than 500 full-time employees who work remotely took part in the research.