‘I can hear their breathing:’ Employers enraged over Gen Z’s rude phone etiquette

The sound of silence?

Zoomers have been infuriating older generations with their seemingly rude behavior, from poor table manners to refusing to greet customers. Now, Generation La-Z is being called out for another faux pas: not saying “hello” when they answer the phone.

That’s right, in a backwards-seeming trend that’s baffling older generations, Zoomers are putting the onus on the person who called to initiate conversation like a game of telephone chicken.

This telephone cold shoulder came to light via a recruiter who posted on X earlier this month, “something I’ve noticed about Gen Z specifically is that a lot of them answer the phone and don’t say anything.”

“The reason to wait in silence is because there are a lot of robocall scams now that wait to hear if there’s a voice there,” confessed one Zoomer. Shotmedia – stock.adobe.com

“Like I can hear their breathing and the background noise, but they wait for you to say hello first,” they explained.

Worst of all, this was not a cold call, but rather a prearranged call made at a time the recipient themselves had chosen — and on a number she had sent them so they’d know she’d be on the line.

This telephone faux pas phenomenon isn’t just anecdotal, either. A YouGov poll taken last year found that one in four Brits aged between 18 and 24 think it is ok to answer a phone call without any form of greeting.

Some older generations found this habit downright rude. Only 27% of people aged between 25 and 34 feel it was ok to voice ghost, while just 14% among those over 45 found the practice acceptable.

Experts claim that Gen Zers’ telephone ghosting is a result of the fact that they didn’t grow up with a landline like their Gen X and millennial brethren. Milan Lipowski – stock.adobe.com

“We all say hello if we are picking up the phone. The same as if you were answering the door,” vented one millennial on a Reddit thread on the topic.

“It’s not just that it’s considered polite, but in the case of the phone, it is to signify you are present and have answered the phone. The person on the other end can’t see you, so having a vocal indication is helpful.”

Employers have cited poor phone manners as one of several reasons Zoomers flounder at the office, wrote Pilita Clark in a piece for the Financial Times. It’s gotten so bad that Mary Jane Copps, founder of a Canadian communication consultancy called The Phone Lady, claims that companies pay her up to $3,100 to train phone-illiterate zoomers.

So why the radio, er, phone silence? Clark speculated that, unlike prior generations, zoomers — who famously prefer messaging to calling — find phone use unnerving because they grew up without a landline.

Therefore, they didn’t get the same telephone etiquette tutorial that their phone-broken millennial and Gen X brethren received from their parents growing up.

“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,” she said.

This is perhaps prudent given the rise of spoofing scams, in which AI-powered bots hijack people’s voice snippets so they can pose as them in order to steal money from their loved ones.

Many Gen Zers copped to this reason with one Redditor writing, “The reason to wait in silence is because there are a lot of robocall scams now that wait to hear if there’s a voice there.”

Another reason — somewhat paradoxically — is that some Gen Zers think it’s rude to dial people.

Copps recalled a young man at one of her workshops declaring, “You know, Mary Jane, if somebody calls me out of the blue, what that says to me is they value their time more than my time, and I am not going to talk to them.”