Ouch, my wife has encountered almost exactly that in a recent brush with a biotech company that seems to have been infected by FAANG expats. She was advised that any kind of sidebar conversation is a faux pas.

I struggled to guess at the real motive. Is it some project manager's blatant control freakery? An org-level, cynical management attempt to commoditize their knowledge workers? Or some kind of emergent failure where culture morphs through openness -> radical transparency -> enforced conformism a la 1984?