Working from home, i was unaware of this phenomena. Has email replaced the phone call?
Preoccupations
The Office Phone Call Was Music to the Ears
By MEGAN HUSTAD
?YOU hardly ever hear the phone ring any more,? the publicity director at my publishing company said last summer. ?I walk down the hall now, and it?s just so quiet.?
We were discussing the prospects for my coming book, and I thought she was warning me that business was down. But that wasn?t it. Her concern was exactly as she?d described it: the phones rarely rang. Everyone sat at desks silently reading and typing e-mail messages instead. People still had conversations, but the background din had sharply diminished.
The waning of the office phone call is one of those cultural declines that few people are likely to lament. It?s true that the changing mechanics of the telephone itself have prompted some sentimental outbursts; a page on
www.wikihow.com gives step-by-step instructions for using an old rotary phone. (Step 1. Remove the handset from the cradle with your hand.)
But the fact that a generation has grown up unaware of pulse dialing and seven-digit numbers seems meaningless when everyone still talks on the phone, constantly ? on sidewalks, while riding the bus, in line at the store. That we?ve transferred a lot of office business to e-mail ? well, who cares?
I didn?t, until I thought back to my own early days in an office, at Vintage Books, eight years ago. The phones trilled continuously, and you could hear the springs in an assistant?s chair as she popped up to announce who was on Line 2. All the noise seemed to add energy and urgency to the day.
And I can?t imagine how a young employee learning the ropes can acquire what she needs to know, as speedily, without the advantage of eavesdropping on her boss?s phone conversations.
How can anyone get a grasp of an industry?s pertinent relationships or decision-making time frames, let alone the fragility of a particular office?s egos, if there are so few chances to hear these people talking to the outside world? The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.
At first glance, there are reasons e-mail seems a boon. It leaves a paper trail. It allows you to formulate responses, rather than having to think on your feet. And if anything has gone wrong, we prefer not to be aurally assaulted. Every time you answer a phone call, you introduce uncertainty into your day.
But this attempt at self-preservation is counterproductive. What else is lost when we skip the call? It?s not just institutional knowledge, but also all the information conveyed through the attendant rituals of phoning.
Say it was your job to give your boss those ?While You Were Out? slips (now so old-fashioned) when she returned from lunch. You saw which names made her smile, and which ones prompted her to swear under her breath.
Phone calls also force bosses to communicate more inside the office. On my first day as a twenty-something editorial assistant, my boss leaned over the cubicle wall and breezily informed me that I needed to ring up one of the most powerful literary agents in the business and ask a favor. I panicked, certain my fear would be conveyed over the line.
That brings up another reason the office phone call is worth preserving: there?s no ready substitute for practicing the necessary summoning of courage for potentially fraught encounters. Advancing in business is often a matter of gaining capacity for confrontation; to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever had to steel herself before sitting down to type a tough e-mail message.
The only lesson I learned right then and there was that this agent didn?t answer her own phone. It was seemingly a minor point, but it served as a good foundation for a deeper understanding of how powerful personalities convey the extent of their influence.
Even casual eavesdropping serves a higher purpose. Sometimes we tune in to others? conversations not to judge, but to console ourselves. We can take solace in finding that our frustrations are no worse than the next person?s. Hearing people quietly try to make doctor?s appointments from their cubicles, or have an argument with their spouse ? phone behavior that still survives ? is an exercise in empathy.
Ultimately, phone calls help us make agreements with ourselves about the person we?re going to be. Will you be that guy who says, ?Hey, how ya doin??? and chit-chats for five minutes before getting down to business? Will you, as one of my colleagues found himself doing, accede to a writer?s demand that he be addressed as ?Dog?? In all those early-career admonitions to ?be yourself,? it?s seldom said that defining your own style is a lot easier once you?ve seen others displaying theirs.
One day I overheard my boss speaking with one of his more demanding authors. I couldn?t hear what the author was saying, and caught only scattered patches of my boss?s side of the conversation ? but I heard the shuffling, the weight shifting from one foot to the other, the uh-huhs of a man receiving a dressing-down. Could I ever stomach the same, I wondered?
THE self-knowledge gleaned from a few years? worth of phone calls is unquantifiable. So it?s unlikely that consultants and organizational learning strategists will pay it much attention. But recently I walked the halls of my old office, and they were cemetery-silent at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. No yelling, no giggling, no breathless appeals, not even a perfunctory ?Hello, may I speak to. ...?
Ultimately, resorting to e-mail rather than picking up the phone results in not merely a quieter workplace but also a feebler one. Until we can convince senior employees to do a better job of sharing what they know about business and how they know it, we?re all better off making phone calls ? and eavesdropping on those of others.
Step 1: Remove the handset from the cradle.
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