Millennials And Gen Z Workers Want To Ban Phone Calls Because They Consider Them Intrusive

According to a survey, office workers want to prohibit telephone calls in the workplace because they find them aggressive and confrontational.

Three-quarters of people would rather communicate by email or social media than speak on the phone, which they find stressful.

The trend is driven by Generation Z and millennial workers under 40 who prefer text messages and WhatsApp.

More than three in four respondents (78 per cent) confessed to frequently ignoring calls when they didn’t recognise the caller’s number for fear it could lead to a hostile dialogue, and one in ten admitted to going out of their way to sidestep face-to-face conversations because they left them feeling on edge.

Tim Agnew, from freebets.com, which commissioned the survey, said that while younger office workers undoubtedly prefer messaging to talking, they also discovered that across age groups there was a feeling that phone calls had the potential to quickly become confrontational.

He added that numerous people prefered to ignore calls but at the same time they were prepared to respond to email and social media messages.

According to the communications regulator Ofcom, the total time spent on landline calls in 2018 was 44 billion minutes, down from more than 100 billion minutes six years before, but mobile calls increased over that time but fell for the first time in 2017 by 1.7 per cent because people had diverted to other forms of online messaging.

In a report that year, Ofcom said falling call volumes were symptomatic of a fundamental shift in behaviour as people turned to messaging.

However, the pandemic led to a peak in calls made from landlines, up 15 per cent in 2020 compared to the previous year, as friends and families unable to meet in person kept in contact by phone.

The survey also uncovered that nine in ten workers want the working week to be lowered to four days.

All too often people will just sidestep uncomfortable conversations, and emails and letters are amazing, but then you have those people who have fallen behind on their payments that will ignore emails and letters, and sometimes the best way to deal with things like this is to just pick up the phone with a cordial voice that deals with the problem with empathy, which usually gets the most promising outcome.

Sometimes the perceived uncomfortable conversation that people believe it will be isn’t as menacing as they make it, and being nice over the phone can get you more cordiality than an email where it’s difficult to read a person’s tone, but then I guess it depends on who you’re talking to on the other end of the phone.

People used to spend a good chunk of their lives dealing with people in positions of authority where they’ve been assured of something via the phone and then later on flatly denied, but things that are written with transparency can’t be denied later on because it’s in black and white, so now, people are using email and texting instead of having an adult discussion with someone else – I actually do feel sorry for the next generation.

The younger generation is now heading for some extremely serious mental health problems, along with working from home which will stunt their social development, and who will have scarcely had any experience of interaction in the workplace, and if people believe that a phone conversation is confrontational then that’s an extremely worrying sign of things to come.