I miss old-fashioned phone calls. Can’t we make them cool again?

Recently I made a strange faux pas. A relatively new work contact suggested a call at 4pm. This suggestion was made via email, after which I went out. When I got back to my desk, I looked at the original email and rang the mobile number at the bottom. “Who is this?” came the cagey response.
“Rhymer,” I said. “We had a call.”
“Oh … right … I sent you a Teams invite … Well … OK, now you have my mobile number I suppose we can do it this way.”
This reaction made me feel a bit awkward. Like I’d invaded her personal space, the equivalent of showing up uninvited at someone’s front door.
After the initial froideur, it was fine. We had a perfectly good conversation. What’s more, it was the three minutes it needed to be, not the thirty minutes often allocated for a Teams call. But I can still feel the awkwardness.
Business phone calls are dying. Cast your mind back to 2010 or even 2018. We were on the phone all the time. We used to end one call and seamlessly pick up another. We did that thing where we talked to the corner of our mobiles, often while striding self-importantly down corridors. I thought it was pretty awful at the time and often wished it would stop. But you should be careful what you wish for because now I miss it like an old friend.
I don’t know about you, but 90 per cent of my work calls have moved to Teams or Zoom or some other video platform that requires me to sit in front of a webcam. Yes, I know you can do these calls without video, but if you do, there’s always a feeling that you’re not quite playing ball.
Of course, I understand that during Covid, lonesome, newly remote workers found solace and esprit de corps in seeing their erstwhile office mates on a screen. But the pandemic is over and most people now spend at least part of their week working from the office. They no longer need to see their colleagues and contacts whenever they speak to them.
However, let’s step back a moment. Why are phone calls so great? Well, speaking as a long-time remote worker, one thing I love about them is that I can sound professional in shorts. With four days’ stubble. Having just woken up. I also quite like walking around when I talk. And, God forbid, should a phone call become dull, I can go through my emails, look at social media or catch up on the exploits of the various cats of TikTok.
There are serious reasons to dislike video calls, too. I’ve written about Zoom fatigue before. Research shows video calls are exhausting and stressful. You’re not meant to be up in someone’s face like that for 30 minutes and there are delays in sync that are unnatural. Video calls deliver much of the inconvenience of attending a meeting but few of the benefits, like being able to read other people’s body language or to non-verbally express your exasperation when Pete from operations runs over his allotted five minutes by twenty minutes.
The real problem, though, is the gross inefficiency. A video call is a “thing” in a way that a phone call just isn’t. It’s usually a diary event with an invite that sits in Outlook or whatever calendar app you use. Most platforms will let you vary the length of calls, but the default is often thirty minutes and so calls last thirty minutes when they could last three. They’re not naturally spontaneous nor flexible.
If video calls are clunky and time-consuming, the “efficient” alternative is often WhatsApp or a messaging app. Don’t get me wrong, WhatsApp is great. What it isn’t is a substitute for a phone call. Messaging is fine for simple yes/no questions, but it’s terrible for complex queries or discussions. That’s when you need a phone call.
The trouble is, nobody wants to do them. A recent Uswitch survey showed that almost a quarter of those aged 18 to 34 never pick up phone calls and that Britons now spend only five and a half minutes a day on the phone. Increasingly, I find people’s email footers don’t even have their numbers on them. So it’s 25 WhatsApps instead of a call lasting a couple of minutes.
I’ve tried fighting this, but to no avail. When I suggest an old-fashioned call, I get blanked or rejected or given some transparently rubbish excuse. “There’s a bad signal where I am which mysteriously means I can use WhatsApp but not make calls.” I asked a younger colleague about this and he told me that many people (especially younger people) find work phone calls intrusive and even anxiety-inducing. Well, yes, but having a job is intrusive. And what about my own Gen X anxiety triggered by your refusal to pick up the phone?
I’m searching for reasons to be optimistic here, but am struggling to find any. The reasons for despair, on the other hand, are numerous and compelling. Along with routinely rejecting calls, younger contacts have started leaving me voice notes on WhatsApp. These strike me as a horrible breach of etiquette. They are not invites to return a call (as answerphone messages often are); rather, they’re telling me that the caller can’t be bothered to type a message and wants to talk at me, not to me. A friend described work voice notes as “an actual hate crime”. She’s right.
Ah well, as they say, it’s their world now. It’s probably a vain hope, but perhaps we can make basic phone calls a hipster thing. Go on, 18 to 34-year-olds, rediscover those quick, spontaneous, human interactions that sit in the space between Teams and WhatsApp. Make phone calls cool again.
Rhymer Rigby is a journalist and author. Follow him on X @rhymerrigby