The workers who do everything on their phones—except answer calls
Your co-workers Zoom, Slack, email and text with ease—but good luck getting many of them to make or answer an old-fashioned phone call. Phone avoidance is so pervasive it has a clinical name: telephonophobia. A lot of bosses just call it aggravating.
Phone use, or disuse, is an intensifying battle in the Hybrid Work War. On one side are people with sore thumbs and Zoom fatigue who are trying to resurrect voice calls, arguing they occupy an important middle ground in business. Sometimes a video meeting is overkill, they contend, and a typed-out message isn’t enough.
“I love technology, but it creates a cognitive load when you’re looking at 32 face boxes on a screen or clicking between multiple chat windows," says Bill Cox, who works remotely from Seattle as vice president of corporate and product marketing at Lyra Health, a mental-health company. “When you jump on a phone call, it’s like, ‘Aaah. Relief!’" Cox, 51 years old, is evangelizing for phone calls at work with mixed results.
The closest he gets from many team members is a recorded voice memo on Slack. On the other side of this telecom skirmish are phone dodgers who insist any conversation that doesn’t need to be face-to-face or on-camera ought to be an email. Being put on the spot by a ringing phone makes some squirm, especially people under 40 who grew up texting and instant messaging with a moment to collect their thoughts.
They say video calls are less anxiety-provoking because they’re usually scheduled and often involve groups of people. Calling without an appointment, or at least a text in advance, isn’t merely inconvenient but downright rude, to some. Nicki Minaj’s “Boss Ass B——" is the go-to hype song when Riley Young needs to psych herself up for a phone
. Read more on livemint.com
