The Workers Who Do Everything on Their Phones—Except Answer Calls

This article was first published by The Wall Streat Journal here: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/hybrid-workers-phone-calls-telephonophobia-8697a451

Your co-workers Zoom, Slack, email, and text with ease—but good luck getting many of them to make or answer an old-fashioned phone call.

Phone avoidance is so pervasive it has a clinical name: telephonophobia. A lot of bosses just call it aggravating.
Phone use, or disuse, is an intensifying battle in the Hybrid Work War. On one side are people with sore thumbs and Zoom fatigue who are trying to resurrect voice calls, arguing they occupy an important middle ground in business. Sometimes a video meeting is overkill, they contend, and a typed-out message isn’t enough.

“I love technology, but it creates a cognitive load when you’re looking at 32 face boxes on a screen or clicking between multiple chat windows,” says Bill Cox, who works remotely from Seattle as vice president of corporate and product marketing at Lyra Health, a mental-health company. “When you jump on a phone call, it’s like, ‘Aaah. Relief!’ ”

Cox, 51 years old, is evangelizing for …

For the full article, go to https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/hybrid-workers-phone-calls-telephonophobia-8697a451