As employees increasingly return to the office, some chief executives are finding they must reteach basic meeting etiquette—including one surprisingly divisive issue: whether checking devices during meetings is acceptable. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been especially blunt on the subject.

At Fortune's Most Powerful Women summit in fall 2025, Dimon said he expects full attention from everyone in the room. "If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you're reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing," he told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. "It's disrespectful."

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, however, sees the issue differently. He argued it would be "weird" for a technology company to instruct its employees not to use their own technology—particularly in larger meetings, where devices can serve as a useful tool rather than a distraction. The contrast is notable given IBM's positioning as a major enterprise AI and hybrid-cloud vendor, which has made employee use of its own technology part of the company's identity.

"I distinguish between one-to-10-person meetings and very large meetings. If it's a very large meeting, I'm sorry. It's not really a meeting. It's a communication vehicle. You're just informing people," Krishna told CNN in October 2025.

The 64-year-old executive added that smaller, more intimate meetings deserve attentive participation. "If it's a small meeting, I would really frown upon if somebody is sitting opposite my desk and lost in their phone," he said. "I would tell them: 'Why don't you come back when you have time?'"

Dimon's long-standing frustration with meetings

Conference room behavior is something Dimon has lamented for years. In his annual letter to shareholders, released in spring 2025, he mentioned the word "meetings" six times, urging employees to schedule them only when necessary and to make them count.

"I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails," Dimon wrote. "This has to stop. It's disrespectful. It wastes time."

While Dimon has not drawn clear lines around meeting size the way Krishna has, his frustration appears to extend well beyond small gatherings. During a conversation at Stanford University in March 2025, Dimon recalled joining a Zoom meeting where attention was clearly divided.

"There were 12 people in the room and four people on the screen and all four people on the screen were on their phone," he recalled. "And people say, and you think you're focusing and learning?"

Dimon's disdain for distracted meetings comes as he has led one of the most aggressive return-to-office mandates on Wall Street. Most JPMorgan employees are now required to work in the office five days a week—at least in part to realize a return on the company's real-estate investments. In late 2025, JPMorgan officially opened its new $3 billion global headquarters in Manhattan, a 60-story skyscraper equipped with 19 restaurants, a company store, and a gym. The five-day mandate placed JPMorgan at the strict end of a broader corporate spectrum, as many large employers settled on hybrid schedules of two or three in-office days.

Putting the devices down might catch your boss's attention

With workplaces relying more heavily on technology than ever, multitasking during meetings has become easier—especially when an AI assistant can generate a post-meeting summary, allowing participants to zone out. The spread of such AI meeting-summary tools across corporate workplaces has added a new dimension to the etiquette debate Krishna and Dimon now embody.

Multitasking in person, however, is especially disrespectful and a bad habit, according to Gary Rich, founder of executive coaching firm Rich Leadership.

"Are manners 'old fashioned?' Is listening to what's happening in a meeting 'old school?'" Rich previously told Fortune. "When people are multitasking during a meeting, the distraction creates a ripple effect—the speaker feels disrespected, other attendees lose motivation, and the meeting becomes less productive."

Taking the high road and practicing good meeting etiquette can ultimately serve as an effective way to earn recognition, demonstrate genuine commitment, and build credibility.

A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on November 4, 2025.