Opinion
Let me describe what a nightmare scenario looks like for many workers, certainly for those under 45. You’re sitting at your desk with your mobile phone next to you. You’ve been scrolling on it at various times throughout the day when suddenly it starts vibrating loudly.
You freeze. It’s a phone call. From your manager! Oh no, you catastrophise, something serious must have happened.
Such a call might be just an innocent check-in, but many people now use their phones for everything except speaking to each other, and baulk at the idea of it ever ringing. Picking up the phone to sort out issues directly with colleagues and clients has fallen far down the list of preferred ways to communicate.
When we want to get a message across, we can choose between face-to-face, video conferencing, phone calls, email, text messages, team chat or private messaging. Yet, we tend to default to three dominant channels: email, chat and meetings, the latter a combination of virtual and in-person.
But as we struggle with overflowing information fatigue and figuring out ways that we can work better, do you know what might be the best old-fashioned solution to our problems? A simple phone call.
If the idea of answering an unscheduled call from your boss makes your heart beat a little bit faster, you are not alone. Your age will likely determine your attitude, with a recent survey of Australian workers by UKG finding that only 9 per cent of Gen Zs named the phone as their preferred communication, behind email, chat and text messages.
That small metal device you carry with you every day might just be the best productivity hack that we overlook.
And while written communication can be mightily effective at helping you process your thoughts into coherent sentences, it shouldn’t be the only way we interact.
Speaking over the phone has a surprising number of benefits. A 2020 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley showed that most people consistently predicted a phone call was going to be awkward or uncomfortable. They were then pleasantly surprised when that turned out to be false, and they felt more connected with the other person afterwards.
Phone calls allow you to be direct, ask follow-up questions, understand the emotional context and get to the heart of a problem in a more efficient way than writing ever can.
Those outcomes would come as no surprise to anyone who has worried about the perceived subtext of a chat message that could have been clarified in five seconds by the tone of someone’s voice. Or a worker who’s wasted time and energy on back-and-forth emails that can be solved with a few choice words.
Every communication style has its uses, and while text is good for organising logistics, keeping paper trails and communicating with large groups at once – it doesn’t need to be the default every single time.
So, when should you use phone calls over texts at work? The simplest answer is there are three main times when a call is the best way to communicate. First, picking up the phone works fastest when you need an immediate answer to a question without wasting anyone’s time. There’s no waiting around for an email reply.
Secondly, phone conversations allow you to add nuance to complex situations. They remove much of the unintended vagueness and allow you to read tone and emotion in the right way. The last is when you just want to gasbag, and forge a deeper, more human connection with the other person on end of the line.
Using a phone helps you get work done, quicker and easier than reading long email chains. And that’s why that small metal device you carry with you every day might just be the best productivity hack that we overlook, and it’s right in the palm of your hands.
Tim Duggan’s new book, Clear in Tension: How to get better at conflict, is available for pre-order now from www.clearintension.com.au
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Tim Duggan is an author, founder and optimist. He co-founded Junkee Media, is the Chair of the Digital Publishers Alliance and writes the monthly newsletter, OUTLET (One Useful Thing Literally Every Time).From our partners
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