About ten years ago, employees at Michigan-based mortgage lender United Wholesale Mortgage started to notice a huge increase in the use of connected devices at work.

“From cellphones, all of a sudden, you have iPads, and then smartwatches,” says UWM’s Chief People Officer, Laura Lawson, who’s been at the company for 15 years. “It can become out of control.”

At the same time, the company began “questioning emails,” Lawson adds. Long threads felt unproductive, so it was imperative to figure out a way to make meetings more efficient.

Then, the company’s CEO, Mat Ishbia, made a big decision: He banned cellphones from company meetings. UWM’s held onto the policy ever since.

“We take notes, we have eye contact,” says Lawson. “We are fully engaged…Because of this, we have more efficient meetings, more takeaways. It really creates an accountability for us to be fully in the moment.”

With recent news about CEOs at JP Morgan and Airbnb growing frustrated about their employees’ cellphone use in meetings, Fast Company looked into various organizations’ cellphone policies, in offices and in remote working environments. Turns out, not many have official policies like UWM—most rely on loose cultural norms, and many grapple with the multi-faceted role the phone’s taken on today.

“Someone taking notes or pulling up a relevant resource looks identical to someone scrolling,” says Ceci Hajredinaj, CEO and Growth Strategist at consultancy Thryve x Design.

Both a distraction and a useful (even necessary, or required) tool, phones can be exceptionally difficult to police in meetings and the workplace at large. Leaders must walk a tightrope between getting employees to focus at work without limiting their resources. A strong cultural dependency on phones makes it even harder to enforce rules at work—and to disengage from the devices that command hours of our waking day.

Varied expectations and a policy patchwork

UWM’s phone ban extends beyond meetings. The company has also established designated spaces, or “privacy coves,” where employees can use their cellphones to make personal calls or check Instagram. Some resemble standard WeWork-style meeting rooms, while others look like actual telephone booths in the middle of the open floorplan. While confining phone use to those spaces is not an official policy, “it’s more of a courtesy,” says Lawson. “We were encouraged, if you’re at your desk, put your phone in your desk.”

The idea is for employees to be locked in when they’re working, so they can have maximally efficient workdays and get home at a reasonable hour.

“When you eliminate the distraction, you get your job done,” Lawson says. The strong anti-cellphone culture has gotten so ingrained at UWM that even when employees walk across its more than two-million-square-foot campus, they “shouldn’t be walking on [their] cellphones,” she adds.

UWM is an outlier. Even at Airbnb, where CEO Brian Chesky has noted frustrations around phone use in meetings, he imposed a lead-by-example model instead of an official ban, a spokesperson from the company told Fast Company.

Before becoming the CEO of her own consultancy, Hajredinaj worked at enterprises including Morgan Stanley, PwC, and Citigroup between 2012 and 2023. “None of those organizations had a formal written cellphone policy,” she says. “What existed was a mix of unspoken norms, manager-modeled behavior, and the team’s conversation about expectations.”

Theresa Fesinstine, an HR consultant, speaker, and adjunct professor at City University of New York, has also noticed a lack of cellphone policies throughout her career, even when companies do spell out meeting etiquette.

“I have seen companies incorporate clarity [that’s] less about a cellphone policy, and more about how we operate during meetings,” she says. She’s spent a career reviewing employee handbooks and guidelines, but has observed policies that explicitly mention cellphones “maybe twice.”

Remote meetings, where participants face the countless distractions of at-home workspaces, may call for cellphone regulations the most.

Michelle Sanguinetti, VP of People and Culture at the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communities, works remotely, and her company introduced “some structure around meeting norms” into its employee handbook to “set the shared expectation of meeting etiquette,” she says—something that can be hard to maintain when everyone’s possibly wearing pajamas from the waist down. That structure includes no phones “to minimize distractions,” she says—along with the expectation to be “camera-ready and focused.”

Not everyone is okay with having their cellphone use regulated like this. One of my friends, who works from home for a tech company, said if his work had such a policy, he would “probably look for a different job.”

“Being present is the norm”

Many employees Fast Company spoke with mentioned not just a lack of rules around cellphones in meetings, but reasons why it wouldn’t make sense to leave phones behind.

A friend of mine who works at a health insurance company told me on background that she wouldn’t work somewhere with a no-phone policy—she has kids, and needs to have her phone present in case of emergencies. Others noted how if they’re in meetings all day, they don’t want to leave their phones at their desks, lest something urgent comes up in their jobs that doesn’t pertain to the current gathering.

Fesinstine says she would have embraced a no-phone meeting policy, as the alternative at her old workplace was a capricious boss: When he got fed up with employees using phones during meetings, he’d use strong language to demand they put them away. The next day, he’d have his phone out during a meeting. It was a “do as I say, not as I do, context,” Fesinstine says, and was not effective for commanding attention.

“I don’t think most companies do a great job,” Fesinstine says of their ability to regulate cellphone use during meetings.

Fesinstine addresses the issue in meetings she facilitates by setting expectations at the top. “Now is the time where we’re flipping our phones over, and we’re not looking at them,” she’ll say. She emphasizes the importance of establishing a “clear directive” for leading meetings with engaged participants.

Setting too rigid rules, though, Hajredinaj cautions, can lead to “compliance theater rather than actual cultural change”—like people discreetly texting on smartwatches instead of openly messaging on their phones. The most effective methods Hajredinaj has seen for dealing with phone use during meetings is “a leader who models presence and creates meetings worth showing up for.” Sanguinetti agrees.

“What I have found is that context really matters,” she says. “In office or in a remote professional setting, the most effective approaches tend to be less about strict rules and more about clear expectations, leadership modeling the behavior, and creating a culture where being present is the norm.”

Lawson insists this plays out at UWM, where she says she never sees the CEO violating the company’s phone policy. “We have to lead by example,” she says. “In meetings, whether with my leaders or…I’m in a team huddle, cellphones are always away.” When new employees join the office, it may take a minute for them to adjust to the cellphone culture, so Lawson will help guide their behaviors.

“If I’m in a meeting and there’s somebody next to me that’s on their phone,” Lawson says, “I’ll nudge them.”

Phones are a “third arm”

Employee reactions to meeting-time cellphone bans can go both ways. While some lament the abundance of ringing and pinging during meetings—what Fesinstine calls a “free for all” for distractions—others found strict policies to be condescending. They felt they could decide for themselves when it was appropriate to bring out a phone, not that it was an act their bosses needed to dictate.

Regardless of employees’ thoughts, one reality is undeniable: People are becoming increasingly entwined with their phones and other smart devices, using them to look up information on the spot, take notes, or help think through problems. According to Consumer Affairs research from 2024, 98% of Americans own a mobile phone, and they look at them, on average, 205 times a day. “The cultural reality is that for a lot of people, a phone is basically a third arm. It goes everywhere,” says Hajredinaj. “That’s just the world we live in now.”

The “third arm” scenario rings even truer for younger workers. “If you’ve been on your phone since you were a baby, [using it] is not a sign of disrespect, it’s just a life habit,” says Fesinstine. Thinking about her Gen Alpha students, she muses about how their increased ability to multitask thanks to constant phone use could be a good thing: “Maybe it’s a positive sign that we’re able to be a little bit more multi-faceted and multi-attentive now.”

Still, Lawson stands by UWM’s policy’s positive effects on meeting participation. She’s gotten so used to not having phones around that it’s become almost a culture shock when she notices them in meetings with other companies.

“I see people with their cellphones out, and it makes me uncomfortable,” she says. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘You were on a Zoom and you have your phone out?’ It’s just so many layers of technology. It’s really hard to focus.”