How does anybody learn anything in today’s office?

It’s quiet. Too quiet.

In 1976 I was working in a record shop. Being young and foolish, what I really wanted to do was work in a record company. To give me a taste of what this was like somebody arranged for me to spend an afternoon in a record company office. The company was Island Records and it was the sales department that hosted me. Here there were four people sitting around one circular table in the basement of the office on St Peters Square in Hammersmith. All four were on the phone. All the time. Literally. They were making calls to or fielding calls from retailers large and small, trying their best to make sure whatever was this week’s priority release was in stock in all of them and dealing with reps who were out on the road.

But that was merely the instrumental side of it. At the same time they were also putting on a phone act for the benefit of the person on the other end of the line and the people in the room. All four did this with a level of energy that I had simply never encountered before. In their hands the humble telephone was more than a device for the transfer of information; it was a medium of entertainment, an instrument of negotiation and a means through which they could project the most important quality they had, which was personality. In those few hours that I remained there, meek and open-mouthed, I learned very little about the detail of what they did but I picked up an enormous amount about the personal qualities you would need to be able to do it in the way that they did. It was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

A few years later I was working in the first of many magazine offices. Here I got used to noise. In those days phones rang and, in later years, faxes shrilled. Typewriters clacked. Carriage returns clanged. Records played. Radios blared. Couriers came in and out, with despatchers’ instructions barking from their shoulders. Everyone’s desks were festooned with Post-it messages taken by colleagues. Work would stop when writers returned from assignments and entertained whoever happened to be in the office with their account of what had transpired. It would stop again as everybody tried to think of a headline or come up with a funny way of doing a picture caption. Everything was collaborative, sometimes annoyingly so. And all the time you would be listening to one side of a phone conversation with the outside world. Over here would be somebody dealing with a printer. Over there another person would be trying to find a lost photographer. In your right ear would be somebody loudly chewing out a PR while in your left would be an advertising rep trying to sweet talk a media buyer into taking the inside front page at the right rate. The result of all this was that you learned an immense amount about how the world worked and all the different ways in which it might pay to approach it.

I rarely go into offices nowadays. When I do I am struck by just how quiet they are. Everybody sits at their work station with their headphones in, going tappety-tappety. keeping their heads down. Phones no longer ring. Nobody is walking around with any actual physical object of the kind that demands comment. When there’s a difficult conversation to be had people take their mobile into a space where they won’t be overheard. All the things that people used to argue about now travel noiselessly – and testily – by email. As a result, nobody is learning anything. As a consequence confidence, both individual and collective, is in retreat.

Recently I spoke to two women who ran a financial PR company. They talked about how difficult it was to get younger employees to do what they had done every day when they started, which was to actually pick up the phone and call their contacts. Why? Because junior PRs, traditionally the most confident of their generation, were now scared of actual human interaction, preferring to message remotely. When the junior employees were quizzed about who had been contacted their response would be “I’ve emailed them”. This, as the partners pointed out, is no use at all. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon from the other side. I receive a certain amount of material from PRs. On occasion, because I prefer to avoid a prolonged exchange of emails, I might phone them back to ask a question. Their surprised reaction when I do this suggests that they find the experience of direct contact, with the accompanying prospect of actual open discussion, almost destabilising. They prefer communication to proceed in the form of a series of unanswered announcements. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to them that a conversation is far more likely to result in an outcome that achieves something.

This is not about PR. That’s just one example of a business which was formerly conducted by talking to people and is now done by email. (It’s a bit of a giveaway that the less a correspondent knows you personally the more likely they are to begin their email by hoping you’ve had a great weekend.) The same formality now extends into personal life. In comparing notes with contemporaries I find that they too have adult offspring who have the dismaying habit of delivering important-sounding news in texts. This immediately leads to the panic-stricken parent phoning back to find out what’s going on and being assured there’s nothing to worry about. Which makes you wonder why they didn’t pick up the phone. On management courses back in the day they used to say that 70% of communication had nothing to do with the actual words being used. It was a matter of tone of voice, facial expression and body language. All the things we used to learn in noisy offices and learn no longer.