Like Gen Zers, billionaire Mark Cuban isn’t a fan of phone calls.
“No, I don’t do calls,” said the former Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner in a TikTok video posted by Masterclass. “You know, I’ll engage with you via email, and trust me, I do this all the time. I’m really good at it.”
But Cuban’s logic for his proclivity toward email over the phone is very different from younger generations. He said conversing over email gives him more time to craft a thoughtful response.
“I’ll give you more comprehensive responses than if it was via phone,” said Cuban, who’s worth an estimated $6 billion. “And if we do it by phone, I’m going to forget half the stuff that we talked about because I’ve got so much going on.”
While Cuban is no longer starring on Shark Tank and sold off his majority stake in the Mavericks, he’s still plenty occupied running Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company and serving as an investor and advisor to the dozens of companies he invested in during his time on the show.
Meanwhile, Gen Zers prefer email or text because they are anxious about talking on the phone. A 2024 study shows nearly a quarter of the generation is so hesitant about talking on the phone that they never answer calls. A college in the U.K. last year even launched a class aimed at helping Gen Z overcome its fear.
While it’s always easy to poke fun at younger generations for their professional-life quirks, the hesitancy for some is actually a deeply rooted fear called “telephobia.” This form of phone anxiety can lead to increased heart rate, nausea, shaking, and trouble concentrating, according to Verywell Mind.
“It speaks to a broader fatigue with immediacy and urgency, where people have grown tired of the hassle culture and obsession with efficiency,” Zoia Tarasova, an anthropologist with consumer insight agency Canvas8, previously told Fortune. “People are quietly rebelling against this immediacy by taking their time to respond to those calls.”
Other business leaders even told Fortune that this telephobia trend has hurt their bottom line. Casey Halloran, CEO and cofounder of online travel agency Namu Travel, said in the 25 years he’s been in business, management has “never seen anything quite like the generational divide” between older and younger travel agents in how they make phone calls. He also said combating telephobia has been a “frequent, uncomfortable topic” at his company, as management has recognized that his younger travel agents register fewer than 50% of the calls compared to older employees.
“As to solutions, we have been doing extensive training, incentives, call observing with our veteran reps, and even hired a business psychologist,” Halloran previously told Fortune. “After more than two years of this struggle, we’re nearly to the point of throwing up hands and embracing SMS and WebChat versus continuing to fight an uphill battle.”
Still, for his own business purposes, Cuban says he prefers emails over phone calls because he can go back and reference what he’s said.
“If we do it via email, I can search for it, always,” he added.
What research tells us about communication styles at work
Just like most business approaches, emailing instead of talking on the phone has its pros and cons.
Research by recruiting firm Robert Walters shows more than half of younger-generation professionals find instant messaging or email, instead of calls or meetings, is the best way to “get things done,” showing how they believe talking over the phone can be inefficient. That’s the “it could have been an email” mentality.
“Younger generations are less inclined to spend hours in a restaurant or cafe when they can have a quick discussion online,” Emilie Vignon, associate director of Robert Walters California, wrote in the 2024 study. To be sure, Vignon also said there are also “downsides” to only conversing via email or text.
“Face-to-face interactions allow for meaningful connections and provide an opportunity for non-verbal communication cues, building trust and rapport with clients and colleagues,” Vignon added. “The subtleties of body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice contribute to a deeper understanding and connection that often cannot be fully conveyed through text or even video chats.”
To be sure, other research from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the University of Chicago, as well as studies by McKinsey & Co., show calls can help resolve issues more quickly than an email, especially as workers spend nearly one-third of their time on email. A 2022 study from DePaul University researcher David J. Bouvier also shows that email enables easy information sharing and can reduce stress.
