ZOOM / Kieran Walsh
Loved ones press their faces against care home windows, or wave from a doorstep two metres away. Neighbours shout concerns across cul-de-sac driveways. Welcome to communication in the age of coronavirus.
Social distancing and isolation to slow the spread of the virus has also spawned the world’s largest work-from-home experiment, and with it questions on how to share messages with staff scattered to the four winds.
The corporate reaction to coronavirus-related office closures has been to prioritise human connection over pure relay of information. Global stock markets plummeted almost relentlessly, but shares in Zoom, the online video and remote conferencing service, have risen 91pc this year as corporate demand for its product spikes.
According to analysts Bernstein Research, by the end of February Zoom had added 2.22 million monthly active users, beating the 1.99 million a month it averaged in the whole of 2019. Zoom doesn’t share usage or download data and wouldn’t comment on the figures.
Demand for spoken work interaction is a sharp reversal of pre-coronavirus trends, where staff had widely relegated picking up the phone to least favoured option. A 2019 Microsoft and YouGov survey asked employees how they communicated day-to-day; face-to-face (74 per cent) was followed by email (69 per cent). Only half (55 per cent) made daily calls.
Email wasn’t really a thing until the 1990s, yet it has usurped the 144 year old telephone despite everyone carrying one in their pocket. Mayur Pitamber, marketing manager at 8x8, a voice over internet protocol service provider, says the decline reflects firms adapting to behavioural change from both customers and employees.
What people have wanted for the last 13 years is not to speak on the phone. US research firm Nielsen pinpointed the switch to silent communication in autumn 2007, when for the first time the average number of per person monthly texts (218) superseded average phone calls (213). It never switched back.
Teenagers led the revolution; 13 to 17 year olds topped texting levels in spring 2008, sending and receiving 1,742 on average per month. At the same time, they spoke on the phone just 231 times a month. Ten years on, those teenagers are in the workplace, and they still don’t want to talk.
“A reluctance to use voice communications in a professional capacity is definitely a key characteristic of digital natives like millennials and Gen Zs,” says Janine Woodcock, a management consultant at Zingg.
“They have a different experience and relationship to voice communications. Even their preference for video tends to be one way, rather than two way communication.”
Older people still prefer calling, according to a 2019 study by Ofcom, the UK communications regulator – which included a 68 year old from Belfast saying, “I prefer to speak to a person. You can get a better understanding” – but a bigger trend towards typed electronic communication exists overall.
“Messages in the form of emails, WhatsApp and Slack seem to be the norm now,” says Raj Goodman Anand of Goodman Lantern, a marketing-tech firm. “The majority of our customers message us before calling, which seems to be an unwritten rule, the new business etiquette.”
Mobile communication makes employees constantly ‘on’ and available to bosses, a newly hyper-busy environment where the immediacy demanded by phone calls can grate. “People understand the value of one another’s time and are more considerate about it, so send a message rather than interrupting with a call that has to be answered in that moment,” says Chris Marron, director of competitive and market intelligence at 8x8.
To combat the scourge of unwanted or unnecessary phone calls, mobile operators have developed a variety of ‘do not disturb’ functions to balance the need for people to have a phone in their pocket with their desire to not take calls.
To control and limit the flow of work calls he receives personally, Goodman Anand heavily restricts them by scheduling most using his online diary, and sending any unrecognised numbers straight to voicemail. He has applied a similar process in his company. “Overall, we make sure our teams are super-efficient and don't spend valuable office hours fielding unsolicited phone calls,” he says.
Nuisance calls are an aggravating factor in the deterioration of our relationship with the phone. Consumers were hit with 2.2 billion nuisance calls and texts from companies selling finance-related services alone in 2017, according to Ofcom data, six million pointless interruptions a day, 4,200 every minute.
Cold callers are on the decline – the proportion of adults with a landline and/or mobile who received a nuisance call fell to fewer than half (49 per cent) in January 2019, for the first time in two years — but the damage is done. Nuisance calls have made people feel anxious about answering the phone, so many now ignore all calls from unknown or withheld numbers.
Businesses also suffer, transferring phone anxiety to the workplace and employees. “We receive between ten to 25 nuisance calls a week on our British and US phone lines,” says Goodman Anand. “They are annoying, especially because most callers haven't done their research on target customers”.
To mitigate this, Goodman Lantern filters all calls to an outsourced answering service, so employees are only interrupted when there are genuine callers on the line. Text services are also deployed in the fight against the hard sell ‘follow up’ call.
“Many customers know our phone numbers and typically WhatsApp us, which is a fantastic filter for us as 95 per cent of messages I receive are from people I know,” Goodman Anand says.
Messaging and emailing may shut out the literal noise of phone calls, but at the price of employee efficiency and business productivity. An average employee spent more than three hours a day dealing with emails in 2018, research by Adobe found. Last year 48 per cent of respondents told Slick Text, a text marketing service, fewer work emails would increase their job satisfaction.
Disengaged employees cost the US as much as $605 billion a year in lost productivity, according to Gallup. Unhappy employees also tend to leave. Almost all (95 per cent) human resources leaders said employee burnout is “sabotaging workforce retention”, in a survey by Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace in 2017. Hiring and training staff is expensive.
“Successful leaders have long known the future of work is about shifting our focus from ‘time spent’ to ‘output achieved’,” says Woodcock. “There is no better way to make fast gains than by reducing the staggering amount of time spent managing email.”
The solution is to replace email and text with one-to-one or communal voice and video comms, she says. This can really aid efficiency in remote working, she continues, because they are more likely to engender confidence that everyone understand and agrees when decisions are made.
According to research firm Gigaom, 87 per cent of remote users report feeling more connected to their teams when using video conferencing. As use of Zoom soars to alleviate the challenges of enforced separation from colleagues, the coronavirus shutdown could end the era of silent email workplace communication, and give employees their voices back.
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