POV: Is working online causing a rise in rudeness?

In a recent edition of Jake Bell’s Who Do You Know? newsletter, the creative and brand strategist referenced a survey on the effects of working from home on social isolation. According to Patrick Sharkey’s “American Time Use” report, the time a US adult spends at home has quadrupled between 2004 to 2024, rising “for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities”. For most, of course, that means work too.

Within the report, Sharkey, an urban sociologist, argues that such prolonged periods at home leads to lower levels of happiness and a diminished sense of purpose. Bell connects this data to the growing popularity of hybrid workspaces, noting that many of us now spend between four to nine hours awake at home each day – and the majority (55.6 percent) stay in their pyjamas throughout. But it also raises another question: how has isolation affected our ability to communicate, especially when the primary method is through screens? The answer, it seems, is not well.

The ‘digital meeting’ has established a grey area when it comes to politeness. The barrier of a screen creates a strange distance, one that often encourages behaviour we’d never engage in during in-person interactions. Say someone invited you for a coffee, only to never show, with no follow-up explanation given. Or maybe, someone insisted on you meeting a group of people, only for no one to acknowledge your existence as you joined. Maybe, the person you are with appears engaged, but you have a sneaking suspicion they’re messaging someone else under the table – perhaps even about the meeting itself. In person, just one of these behaviours would make us think twice about meeting someone again, let alone engage in a working relationship. Yet, they’re actions we’re all likely to experience (or commit ourselves) on any given ‘WFH’ day.

So we pitched the question to creatives across the industry: what is “impolite meeting etiquette”? In these conversations, there were two standout actions causing offence – eating and exercising.

We heard countless tales of colleagues purposefully scheduling meetings over designated lunchtime hours, only to munch through catch-ups. In most cases the act felt like performative busyness, where any actual contribution was missed between mouthfuls. “I never had their full attention,” relayed one anonymous submission. “They would bark out unrelated instructions and demands to both other people in the same room as them and on the call. All this, and eating at the same time.” Of course, in crunch times and on those back-to-back days, a quick bite on screen is unavoidable. Potentially avoidable, however, is one submission we heard of someone making pancakes from scratch – camera on.

And then there were the treadmills, the stairmasters and exercise bikes – equipment staged just off screen but fully invading a digital call. In lockdown, an attempt to get some steps in during work hours was, you could argue, excusable. But today that’s hardly the case – especially if you’re actively contributing to the meeting. A light pace on a treadmill? Sure. Pausing the stride when it’s your turn to speak? Even better. Consciously deciding to join a call, from a gym, with weights in hand? Maybe think twice. In one case, a designer partly excused a client’s decision to “actively run on a treadmill”, as they were designing an app for a fitness and dieting platform. But, their decision to talk while “bouncing up and down and heavily breathing into their microphone” didn’t exactly consider the caller down the line.

Most of the contributions we received for this article were submitted in jest. At many points, poor meeting etiquette was lumped in with your classic laughable “Zoom fail”. Accidentally sharing screen to a stream of intimate messages. Creative directors offering feedback in billows of vape smoke. Automatic motion detected confetti “reactions” cannoning off at inappropriate moments. The tone of conversation turned, however, when interactions aired on the side of disrespectful between seniority levels, or among client and creative.

In this context, the air of tension between collaborator and client is exacerbated within a digital context. The push and pull of this relationship, and the reality of one being a service provider working towards the vision of another, is a nuance that, on screen, clients have got comfortable taking advantage of.

Similar to the lunchtime caller, there is a deliberate theatre of busyness that those in positions of power seem insistent on facilitating. One example was a boss who performatively joined every meeting precisely three minutes late – like clockwork – so that the rest of the team would wait. This unconcerned behaviour persists across more high-stakes external calls as well. In one instance, a creative team presented its first round of ideas while the client hoovered their living room. Another group told us of a client joining a call literally mid-yawn.

It’s even happening in interviews. One contributor recalled a conversation with a global agency where it quickly became clear the executive creative director hadn’t done their research: “He was keen to hire me, but I wasn’t so convinced he really knew anything about me (I reckon he was excited about having a POC female creative).” Things became even more obvious when the director was asked why they thought she was suitable for the role: “In the reflection of his oversized glasses I could see him Google my name, pull up my website, and frantically find a project to talk about. A huge learning – if you have glasses and a massive iMac screen, be careful!”

These are, potentially, one-off occasions but the brazenness of each story demonstrates a shift in respect towards creative ideas, and creatives themselves. It’s also a waste of everyone’s time, and surely, the client’s dime too. What’s the point of literally paying a creative to work with you, but then pretending you have better things to do than collaborate? Or, worse, not listening to them at all.

The blurring lines between work and home is a key reason for this behaviour becoming increasingly common. Worryingly, it seems our industry has picked up on the worst factors of Silicon Valley office culture – where employees are famously encouraged to dine at the office canteen, maybe hit the gym, all without leaving the workplace. Now, we’re mimicking that culture from our own homes. We’ve all leaned into the tracksuit-bro persona because, well, it’s the ‘new normal’. Or it was, in 2020. But in an industry built on ideas, communication, and connection, what happens when we stop fully engaging with the person on the other side of the screen?

Whether at home or in the office, the “busy” bosses and clients aren’t disappearing anytime soon. But maybe a simple first step is for all of us to stop trying to juggle two, three, or even four things at once. Even in periods of crunch time, try to mute the Slack, focus on the call. At the very least, your own engagement might help you spot the people, clients, and creatives who are truly worth engaging with.