My employer does this, and it's wonderful.
> Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
No, but nobody is making that argument.
30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.
I agree it's important for meetings to be concise and focused on issues that are relevant to the attendees. However, I don't think the presenter should have to be flashy. If someone has their phone/laptop out, they might not even give the presenter the initial few minutes of attention it takes to get engaged with the topic.
Also, I'm in favor of banning devices at meetings because IME it leads to improvements in the meeting structure. If there's a long, boring meeting I might be relatively OK with it if I can spend the time doing something else on my laptop. If the only option is to pay attention to the useless meeting, however, then I'm more likely to provide suggestions and pressure to make the meeting better.
I don't feel inspired by my manager/team so I'm going to doze off at my desk, and My employees are over-paid lazy sacks of s* are two sides of the same coin.
We do 30~60 minute meetings that are reasonably done well, people are impacted by what is discussed.
But honestly it’s nothing so difficult or riveting that needs everyone to focus like crazy for an hour straight.
Then people talk slowly, have to explain details that half of the room knows but not the other one. People ask questions that you might not care about but the rest of the people do, and you won’t stand up and go away just for a 5 min question.
Then focusing 100% of our intention doesn’t shorten the meeting. We tried, and it wasn’t more efficient in any significant way (who cares for 10min gained for 50 min of full focus?). Instead people would just skip meetings altogether, because the balance between the info to share and one hour of their time was almost always in favor of their time, and dreaded to no end mandatory meetings. ROTI scores were horrible while never improving.
We just had to stop.
Most people are sleep deprived, and if they can't focus for a 30 second meeting then they should head to the nap room.
Banning phones and laptops means that everyone in the meeting is either invested in it or motivated not to get invited to the next one.
That is, these are good questions, but are they intended as road blocks? Each one can be easily answered and you can always change your answer.
I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.