The Workers Who Do Everything on Their Phones—Except Answer Calls
Bosses and employees are wrestling over whether voice calls have a place in the hybrid era
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.
Getting up the courage
Nicki Minaj’s “Boss Ass B——” is the go-to hype song when Riley Young needs to psych herself up for a phone call.
She works in an office in Plano, Texas, four days a week as an audience engagement manager at NextAfter, a firm that advises nonprofits on fundraising strategies. She doesn’t think twice about swinging by a colleague’s desk to talk, but pick up the phone on her work-from-home day?
“If I can’t see their facial expressions, I’m fearful that I might say the wrong thing or they’ll take something the wrong way, and I won’t be able to tell,” she says.
Emails and instant messages carry the same risk but Young, 26, prefers them over voice calls because she considers them more efficient—usually. She’s been trading emails with a third-party vendor for two weeks, trying to resolve a problem she suspects could have been fixed in a two-minute phone call.
Many Americans’ phone skills are rusty. Data traffic on mobile apps soared from 1.5 trillion megabytes in 2012 to 73.7 trillion megabytes in 2022, the most recent year available from CTIA, a wireless communications trade group. Landline usage plummeted over the same decade, while voice-call minutes on mobile devices grew just 8.7%.
For most people, a social call isn’t a daily occurrence, not even a quick check in with a spouse or child. Two-thirds of American adults talk to family, friends or neighbors on the phone four or fewer times a week, according to a Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted this spring. For one in five adults, social calls happen less than once a week.
Millennials and Gen Zers generally call less than others, but telephonophobia isn’t purely a generational condition. Stephen Boudreau, 46, says placing a business call makes him almost as nervous as he was when he phoned his future father-in-law to say he planned to propose.
That call went fine—Boudreau and his wife celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary last week—yet he still worries about bothering people with unannounced calls and sweats when his own phone rings unexpectedly. He avoids the phone whenever possible in his job as vice president of brand and community at Virtuous, a maker of customer-relationship software, and in his personal life too.
He recently hired a new pest-control company to spray his home monthly but hasn’t gotten up the gumption to call and cancel the old one. He’s been paying for two services for three months.
Professional help
Chantel Cohen, a therapist and business coach whose clients include the Google for Startups co-working program, has noticed a surge in phone-call anxiety in recent years. Many people she counsels say the phone is their least-favorite way to communicate because it offers neither the ability to read body language nor the chance to self-edit before clicking “send.”
“It really feels scary to a lot of my clients,” says Cohen, 58.
I cold-called a consultant who calls herself The Phone Lady (real name: Mary Jane Copps) to ask about her business. Naturally, she answered.
Companies hire her to help employees overcome their phone fears. She used to charge $1,800 for full-day workshops, but demand is so great she now bills $3,000 for half-day trainings or $195 an hour for individual coaching.
“I’ve started getting questions in workshops that surprise me, like, ‘How do I end a phone call?’ ” Copps says. “Things that to many of us seem obvious are no longer obvious.”
Half the battle is convincing people telephone etiquette still matters.
Scott Eastin runs a small staffing agency that places independent tech workers, many of whom ignore his phone calls about contract opportunities. It’s gotten so bad that in recent months he’s started using Loom, an app for taping video messages, to contact candidates on LinkedIn. The response rate is about 40%, much higher than with voicemail.
Specialists with sought-after skills can often get away with being unresponsive, but as tech-sector layoffs continue, Eastin, 56, says there’s an easy way to stand out if you’re looking for contract work: Take that device in your hand and hold it up to your ear.
“I’ll do business all day with someone who answers their phone,” he says. “In fact, I’ll take a less-qualified candidate who calls back.”
Paul Overberg contributed to this article.
Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com
