When you answer the phone, do you say “hello” or offer some sort of greeting right away, or do you expect the caller to initiate the conversation?
If you’re over the age of 28, my guess is you’re confused by this question. Of course you say “hello” when picking up the phone.
But Gen Z — a generation raised in a post-landline universe — may disagree. They expect you — the person calling — to speak first.
A recent viral tweet brought up this alarming etiquette divide. Someone who works in recruiting tweeted that she’s noticed that when she calls Gen Z people (at their scheduled call time), they often wait for her to speak first instead of saying “hello.”
The replies to her tweet were even more eye-opening — to me, anyway: Many young people agreed that it should be the caller’s responsibility to start speaking and offer a greeting, not the person answering the call.
The reasons these people gave settled into two main camps: The first is the huge amount of spam calls we all receive. (They are annoying.) Often, those telemarketers or robocalls don’t start until they hear someone say “hello.” By remaining silent when you pick up, you can screen for a real human.
Gen Z is wary of scammers
Spam calls are a scourge, and it’s hard to complain about anyone’s tactics to avoid them. And yet … there’s gotta be a better way, right?
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(I must note here that in my experience as someone who almost always answers unknown calls, since they may be work-related, if I say “This is Katie” instead of “Hello,” it seems to stump the robocall software, which activates on the word “hello.” I would recommend you all try this technique, but you’ll have better results if you use your own name instead of “Katie.”)
Another concern is that scammers might use a recording of your voice saying “hello” to clone it for use in other scams. There is some real concern here. Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, told me there’s scant data on how often this happens, but it’s a real thing. “If you must respond, a neutral, non-personal greeting like ‘Who is this?’ may be less useful for cloning because it is less emotionally expressive and less common as a voice sample,” Briedis said. (Personally, I think that’s more rude than just silently breathing into the receiver, but hey.)
Etiquette is changing
The other reason some people are avoiding the “hello” seems to be a generational difference in etiquette. Some young people simply believe that if you’re the one who is calling, you should initiate the conversation.
If that makes your blood pressure start to rise, like it does with me, let’s take a deep breath together and try to think about this kindly. Are young people hopelessly adrift in society, untethered from being capable of the most basic elements of communication? Is this perhaps related to the “so-called “Gen Z stare” where young people in customer service situations blankly stare back at you (or avoid eye contact, wordlessly)?
I’m not saying it’s not that. I think that saying “hello” when you answer the phone is normal, commonly accepted social etiquette, and not doing it can be slightly confusing for a caller.
But just because something used to be common etiquette doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. The telephone is a relatively recent invention in the history of human communication, as is the word “hello,” which Thomas Edison encouraged as the way to start a conversation on the new invention in the 1870s. Not until the 1940s did the majority of American households have their own phone. A whole new etiquette for handling phone calls has been invented within a generation or two.
Landline phones had different customs
As an elder millennial, I grew up with a home landline without caller ID, answering with variations of, “Notopoulos residence, this is Katie.” I’ve also had jobs with desk phones where strangers would call out of the blue (gasp!) and I would answer with the company name, my full name, maybe even a rote “How can I help you?” Might we have possibly missed out on the Beastie Boys’ album “Hello Nasty” if not inspired by the way the receptionist at the Nasty Little Man PR firm answered the phone?
But just within my (relatively) brief time as an adult, the way we use phones and what we do with them has changed drastically. Now, when you call someone, you assume you are reaching their direct personal mobile phone, not a shared family phone that other people might answer. Answering machine outgoing messages used to be an art form; now people rarely leave or check voicemail (I usually read the transcription in my iPhone’s Visual Voicemail instead of actually listening to the recording). There’s a new calculus we’re all still muddling through about what should be a Zoom and what should be a regular phone call.
I’m often texting or emailing someone several times to agree on a set time do to a five-minute phone call. When I do call someone out of the blue, I find myself apologizing for it, as if I had shown up on their doorstep unannounced at dinnertime.
I enjoy waxing nostalgic about the Old Days of Landlines, but it doesn’t mean any of the old ways were necessarily better. Progress marches on!
Just because it has been the etiquette to say “Hello?” when you answer the phone doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever. The technology of phones has changed completely. Why shouldn’t the rules change with it?
