A fresh phone hell in the office

Many workers in their 20s now answer calls without saying 'hello,' 'hi' or anything at all. Photo by Getty Images/iStockphoto

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The other day, a recruiter in the United States posted something online that quickly racked up an improbably large number of views.

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This was no rant about war, strife or Donald Trump. It was merely an observation made by a heavy phone user that a lot of workers in their 20s now answer calls without saying ‘hello,’ ‘hi’ or indeed anything at all.

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“I can hear their breathing and the background noise, but they wait for you to say hello first,” said the perplexed recruiter, adding she was talking about pre-arranged calls made at precisely the time the silent breathers had themselves chosen.

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Also, she was calling on a phone number she had sent them, so they could tell who would be on the line, having just sent an email reminder about the upcoming call.

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Like others who saw her post, I found this news baffling. I realize a lot of young people find phone use unnerving. I understand this may be because they grew up without a landline in the home, so never got the free phone training from their parents that the rest of us took for granted.

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I can almost imagine how years of snapchatting might lead one to feel anxious about a phone call coming out of the blue with no appointment. Almost. But who picks up a call and says nothing?

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The answer, it seems, is people yet to hit 25. A remarkable 40 per cent of British people between 18 and 24 think it is acceptable to answer a phone call without any form of greeting, a YouGov poll found last year.

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Only 27 per cent of those aged between 25 and 34 feel the same way, and support plummets to 14 per cent among those over 45 who I think I can safely say find it weird or just plain rude.

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Non-greeting is not confined to the U.K. or U.S. “It’s very common,” says Mary Jane Copps, founder of a Canadian communication consultancy called The Phone Lady.

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One reason for not saying hello, she told me, has nothing to do with phone anxiety and everything to do with the robocalls that have turned so much of modern communication into a joyless cesspit. “Rather than start the conversation and then discover it is a recorded message or scam, they wait to hear who or what is calling them before they respond.”

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This chimes with what people told the U.S. recruiter. Depressingly, one person said they had been taught in high school that answering a call with a greeting could allow their voice to be recorded and used for identity fraud, so they always stayed silent until the caller spoke. Another said the rise of artificial-intelligence voice cloning made it natural to avoid answering the phone with a greeting.

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I sympathize, and have no doubt failed to say anything myself when answering a call from a number I suspect to be spam.

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Perhaps we all need to think again about using voice recognition as a password for anything crucial, like a bank account. Either way, poor phone manners are a problem in the workplace. Employers now consistently complain about their youngest workers’ lack of communication skills. Some say it is one of the reasons newly hired graduates do not last the distance or arrive in the office ill-prepared for the world of work.