Hang up the office phone, it’s aggressive, say millennials

OFFICE workers want to ban telephone calls in the workplace because they find them ‘confrontational’ and ‘aggressive’, according to a survey.

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) admitted to frequently ignoring calls when they did not recognise the caller’s number for fear it could lead to a confrontational conversation.

And one in ten admitted to going out of their way to avoid faceto-face conversations because they left them feeling on edge.

Tim Agnew, from freebets.com, which commissioned the survey, said: ‘While younger office workers clearly prefer messaging to talking, we also found that across age groups there is a feeling that phone calls have the potential to quickly become confrontational.’

He added: ‘Many people are reflecting that by ignoring calls while at the same time being 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 100billion minutes six years earlier.

While calls from mobiles rose over that period, they fell for the first time in 2017 by 1.7 per cent as people turned to other forms of online messaging.

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

However, the pandemic led to a rise 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 touch by phone.

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