It’s easy to chalk up multitasking to human proclivity for distraction. However, labeling it as “just the way people are” is not only dismissive but also woefully inaccurate. When a sizable portion of your team is multitasking, it’s not a coincidence or an anomaly; it’s a glaring indicator that should set off alarms for you as a leader. This isn’t just about a few distracted individuals; this is symptomatic of a much larger issue, often tied to poor meeting design and, more broadly, a communication breakdown within the team or organization.

As a leader, one of your primary responsibilities is to create an environment that empowers your team to succeed. When a significant percentage of your team is multitasking during meetings, it implies that you haven’t succeeded in making that environment conducive to full engagement. Now, you may argue that employees have a responsibility to stay focused. However, as the person setting the tone, structure, and agenda of these meetings, you have a more considerable share of the responsibility to keep them dialed in.

The problem isn’t that your team members are choosing to be distracted but rather that they feel compelled to do so because of inefficiencies in the meeting structure. Maybe the agenda is too broad, or the meeting is too long, or there are too many voices in the room. Either way, something about the format of your meetings is driving your team to seek productivity elsewhere. This kind of behavior isn’t just occurring in a vacuum–it’s a response to the environment you’ve created or allowed to persist.

Moreover, this disengagement extends beyond the meetings themselves. When your team is multitasking in meetings, the implication is that there’s not enough time outside of meetings to accomplish their tasks. And that is a massive issue. It shows that the organization or team may be operating in a perpetual state of “meeting overload,” leaving little room for focused, uninterrupted work. Thus, multitasking isn’t the disease–it’s merely a symptom of a more systemic problem that often starts at the top.

In essence, when you see multitasking as a recurrent issue, it’s an opportunity—not for disciplinary action against your employees, but for introspection and constructive change in how you structure communication and time. Are you merely holding meetings out of habit, or are they genuinely needed? Are you inviting too many people, diluting individual contributions? Are you failing to provide an agenda that holds attendees accountable for their engagement? These are the questions you, as a leader, need to ask and address. Failing to do so will ensure that your team continues to multitask, not out of defiance, but as a coping mechanism to navigate through the maze of inefficiency that has been set before them.

Large meetings are killing productivity. We’ve all sat in those meetings. The ones with 20-plus people where everyone gets a chance to speak, dragging the event on for hours. You might call it inclusive–I call it a productivity massacre. Simply put, the larger the meeting, the less individual engagement you’ll find. How much input can someone offer when they are one in a sea of many? Not much.

You’ve probably got them in your calendar: recurring meetings, every week, until the end of time. Sounds like a good idea? Wrong again. If people know they’ll have a second, third, or even fourth chance to get their points across, they are less likely to engage fully each time. The redundancy of these meetings encourages distraction, allowing multitasking to seep in.

Now, here’s an idea you likely haven’t spent enough time considering: asynchronous communication. Emails, Slack messages, and shared documents—these are tools that allow your team to communicate without needing to be available at the same time. Asynchronous communication enables your employees to respond when it’s most convenient for them, thus preserving the sacred realm of deep work hours and respecting individual productivity rhythms