Reasons why Millennials prefer e-mail to phone in a work environment:
1) We don’t want to talk to you.
2) We don’t want to pause our music to talk to you.
3) We don’t even talk to each other on the phone — why would we want to talk to you?
But the biggest reason is A TRAIL. If I e-mail you back, you can see what was said in the future. You can’t tell me I forgot to tell you something because it’s right there. You can’t tell me I “never reached out” because we can both SEE it. I don’t have to trust your recollection.
And, in a group inbox, you can see who has been responded to. I got forwarded a voicemail from my supervisor (through e-mail! imagine that!) asking me to call some lady back for clarification. So I did, against my will of course…and she said somebody had called her yesterday.
Who? When? What did y’all talk about? Is follow-up necessary?
Phone calls back and forth only work in a workflow where the standard procedure is to *log* phone calls in a shared system with a brief summary of what was discussed. Otherwise, y’all need to let us e-mail. It’s not just about a generation gap. It’s also about efficiency.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Any feedback can be proffered via e-mail.
Also: let’s keep it real – we multi-task better than you do. If I’m on the phone with you, I’m FORCED to do that ONE thing and put whatever you want above all the other things I could’ve been doing. If you e-mail me, I can research what you want (while doing other things), find the solution (while doing other things), and offer it to you in a nice concise package (while doing other things) without sitting on the phone with you in awkward silence looking for the answer to whatever you think is urgent. (It’s not urgent. You’re not dying. I know it’s not urgent.)
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