For better or worse, conference calls have long been a staple of the American work routine, but the advent of mobile technology has added some new wrinkles. A new study looked into what’s really happening on the other end of that phone connection.

Think back to your last conference call. Chances are you took it on your mobile device. Were you in the office or offsite somewhere? Did you focus solely on the work at hand, or was your attention split between the call and something else? And what’s the strangest place you’ve ever taken a conference call?

These questions and more were the focus of a survey released last week by conference-call provider InterCall. The results offered surprising (though maybe not?) details about employees’ mobile conferencing habits.

Of the 500 full-time employees that took the survey, 64 percent said they prefer to take a conference call on their mobile device as opposed to a landline—not unexpected given the increasingly mobile and flexible nature of the American workplace. The number of conference calls accessed by mobile devices rose from 19.4 percent in 2011 to 21.2 percent in 2013.

The rise in mobile conferencing brings some new dynamics to the conversation. The survey found that 82 percent of employees multitask while on a conference call, and 80 percent said they were more likely to mute themselves when using a mobile device. Some of the more common alternate activities that go on include checking email (63 percent), going to the restroom (47 percent), texting (44 percent), checking social media (43 percent), and playing video games (25 percent).

Respondents made several surprising admissions as well: 39 percent said they had dropped out of a call without announcing it, 29 percent had taken at least one call from the beach or a pool, and 27 percent said they had fallen asleep during a conference call.

Fix the Connection

Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, recently told Harvard Business Review(HBR) that call participants’ locations and the devices they use shouldn’t get the blame if a call isn’t productive. “You can be completely engaged on the beach, in your car, on an airplane,” he said. Rather, if people are distracted on a call, it’s more likely a problem with “the channel choice to begin with, why this person’s on the call, or the facilitation skills.”

In a separate article on HBR, Keith Ferrazzi, CEO of consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, offered some tips for keeping conference-call attendees focused. For example: “To help keep people engaged, different individuals could be assigned various tasks, such as white board manager, minutes recorder, Q&A manager, and so on,” he wrote. “These functions could be rotated for every meeting.”

What tips do you have for engaging participants in a conference call? Share them in the comments.

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