On the side instead of on task – Employees are twice as distracted online as in person

With the rise of remote work, team meetings increasingly take place online. A field study by BFH Business School examined the effects on more than 600 employees: when attending online, twice as much meeting time went to off-task activities as when attending in person, and both engagement and motivation were lower. This raises questions about how meetings are designed.

Remote work offers numerous advantages. At the same time, there are concerns about how this form of work organisation affects employee engagement and team dynamics (Gajendran et al., 2024). In this context, we asked ourselves what team members actually do on their computers and phones during team meetings — and how engaging in activities unrelated to the meeting relates to individual engagement, motivation, sense of team belonging, and perceived performance.

Together with Bachelor’s and Master’s students at BFH Business School (Alessandra Fernandes, Erkay Denizeri, Jeirasa Santharaj, Kaneko Shintaro, Maria Grossenbacher, Sarah Schmid, Valeria Haljimi), we pursued this question in a quasi-experimental field study. The study recorded the behaviour of more than 600 employees during team meetings, distinguishing whether the person took part in person or online. Employees reported how much time they spent during the meeting on which off-task activities. They were also surveyed on their individual engagement, motivation, sense of team belonging, and perceived performance.

The results show that when employees attend team meetings online, they spend more than a quarter of the meeting time on digital off-task activities (26% of the time), compared with 13% when attending in person. Online participants thus spend twice as much time as in-person participants writing emails, reading messages, composing text messages, or shopping online. The results also show that sense of belonging, team engagement, motivation, and one’s own work performance are rated substantially higher for in-person participation than for online participation.

The results allow for two readings. On the one hand, they could argue for holding team meetings in person more often. A study by Aksoy and colleagues (2026) points in the same direction: in-person attendance at a monthly team day led to improved intra-team communication and higher productivity compared with control group only meeting online.

On the other hand, the findings point to the design of the meetings themselves: team meetings may be perceived as not relevant, not sufficiently interesting, and too little interactive. Off-task activities also occurred in in-person meetings — albeit to a substantially lesser extent. This also means that we need to think harder about the purpose and design of team meetings, so that employees take part with interest, engagement, and full attention. Perhaps we need alternative forms of organised exchange between team members, such as the in-person team day proposed by Aksoy and colleagues (2026). What is certain, however, is that we should thoroughly rethink the typical online meeting.

PS: Off-task activities also have a negative effect on learning and grades in teaching contexts — in earlier studies we were able to show that when students attend courses online, they spend substantially more time on off-task activities than students who follow classes in the classroom. And this had a negative effect on their learning and their grades (see Ochs et al., 2024; Ochs & Sonderegger, 2021).

References

Aksoy, C. G., Bloom, N., Davis, S. J., Marino, V., & Ozguzel, C. (2026). The Value of One Office Day a Month (Working Paper Nr. 35331). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w35331

Gajendran, R. S., Ponnapalli, A. R., Wang, C., & Javalagi, A. A. (2024). A dual pathway model of remote work intensity: A meta-analysis of its simultaneous positive and negative effects. Personnel Psychology, 77(4), 1351–1386. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12641

Ochs, C., Gahrmann, C., & Sonderegger, A. (2024). Learning in hybrid classes: The role of off-task activities. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 1629. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50962-z

Ochs, C., & Sonderegger, A. (2021). What Students Do While You Are Teaching – Computer and Smartphone Use in Class and Its Implication on Learning. In C. Ardito, R. Lanzilotti, A. Malizia, H. Petrie, A. Piccinno, G. Desolda, & K. Inkpen (Hrsg.), Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (S. 501–520). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_29