A few years ago, asking a junior colleague to make a phone call would not have registered as a particularly daunting task. Now, it seems, many younger staff would be more willing to donate a kidney than call a restaurant to push a booking back an hour. In media, I have been astounded by twentysomethings’ reluctance to pick up the phone. Instead, they’ll embark on a long campaign of avoidance: an initial email, a ‘gentle nudge’, and then a ‘just moving this to the top of your inbox’, all while hours drift between the lack of responses.
It’s inefficient and, frankly, a bit sad. A five-minute or even 30-second phone call can often deliver clarity and better results faster than an email competing with 500 others. A call can lock in a meeting, clear up a misunderstanding, or convey tone that written messages simply can’t. It can also offer a welcome break from screens.
Of course, Gen Z’s hesitation has some context. Twentysomethings have grown up communicating primarily through text: asynchronous, editable, curated. A phone call, by contrast, comes with no draft attempts. It forces you to think in real time.
But the strange thing is that Gen Z’s discomfort with phone calls apparently sits alongside an unprecedented confidence in other forms of communication. Many young people who would sooner overpay a bill than ring customer services to query it, are perfectly comfortable posting videos of themselves online – dancing or documenting their latest break-up. They’ll share a blog about losing their virginity, but they won’t call a pub to check which football match it’s showing.
A lot of this is clearly the legacy of coronavirus lockdowns and an unfortunate side effect of remote working. Many younger professionals entered adulthood, and the workplace, at a moment when spontaneous interaction was on the wane. Offices became Zoom calls; university became online seminars; social lives became group chats. At precisely the age when self-assurance is normally built through repeated low-stakes encounters, many instead became accustomed to apps for everything.
It’s a sign of something broader, particularly among Gen Z, though not exclusively: a society that is overstimulated and distracted to the point of fractured attention. When even leisure becomes background noise – consider the TV left on while scrolling – I suppose sustained, real-life conversation starts to feel weirdly demanding. The ability to focus on one human interaction, without interruption or parallel distraction, is being filed down.
They’ll share a blog about losing their virginity, but they won’t call a pub to check which football match it’s showing
And this is where the issue circles back to something far more practical than cultural critique. Whatever the causes, the consequence is an entire wave of workers who are uneasy with the most fundamental professional skill there is: talking.
So, what’s the solution? Look, we don’t need anything as draconian as lockboxes for smartphones during office hours; nor do we need to go for a full 1990s revival and issue everyone with one of those coiled cord landlines. You know, the sort that somehow managed to contort itself into a macramé sculpture even when left untouched.
But many workplaces would benefit from actively training staff, especially younger members, in how to use the phone properly. How to do light chat without panicking. How to remember the details that make professional relationships easier: who you’re speaking to, where they went on their recent holiday, how many children they mentioned last time, which team they support.
There is, sometimes, a worrying modern temptation to explain away a discomfort with phone calls in elaborate psychological terms. As if ordinary professional awkwardness must necessarily be reframed as something to be accommodated, rather than occasionally overcome. Neurodivergence exists, sure, but not everything is neurodivergent. Most of the time, not liking speaking on the phone doesn’t require a diagnosis. It’s just unfamiliarity, and familiarity is best achieved by doing.
A phone call forces focus and prioritisation. In that sense, it also restores a degree of accountability to everyday work. Follow-through becomes harder to avoid. You can’t half-engage with a conversation in the way you can mark an email as read without reading it.
I’m certain that most people do not actually dislike phone calls once they are doing them; what they dislike is the anticipation. In most instances, though, the call itself is shorter, simpler and far less dramatic than the version of it that plays beforehand in their head.
Who knows, maybe, with a bit more practice, young people could even grow to find they prefer phone calls to performative emailing? And perhaps, after speaking to someone, they might genuinely hope they are well.
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