Teaching young people to talk

Only connect

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, the Black Farmer, has to teach his young employees to pick up the phone and talk directly to people

Getting the 5.52am train from Exeter St David’s to Paddington is not a journey for the faint-hearted. But I believe face-to-face meetings are essential to build and maintain relationships in our business and personal lives.

It is an expensive trip at this time of the morning and a long way to go for a one-hour meeting. Still, my belief is that the old-fashioned way of doing things outstrips the convenience of the modern age.

‘Why not send an email or have a Teams or Zoom meeting?’ my younger colleagues are always asking.

I organise trips up-country myself from my farm on the Devon-Cornwall border, and I do so as if I were getting ready for a date. I confirm, confirm again, and ring ahead so I can hear from a person’s lips that the meeting will be going ahead.

I got one of my bright, young, university-educated interns to organise this particular trip. As I journey onwards from Paddington to Holborn, it is as if I have landed on another planet. Almost everyone is glued to their phone, oblivious to the world around them.

I am relieved to reach the sanctuary of my destination and the office reception area, and I give praise that I can escape those humanoids controlled by their screens.

‘He is not in.’ The reply pulls me up short. But I have a 9am appointment with him. ‘Sorry, but he has been on holiday for the past week and he will not be back for another four days.’

I ring my intern to ask if the meeting has been confirmed. Frustration bubbles up to explosive levels when I’m told the damning words, ‘Well … I sent an email.’

Since the start of the digital revolution, I have been in a losing battle with young people. I try to get them to understand that, rather than expecting things to get done by sending an email, they must pick up the phone and speak to people.

The new form of business communication is via WhatsApp messaging and emails. Everything is text-based. This technology has speeded up communication. But it is breeding a generation of young people who are terrified of picking up the phone and speaking to a human being.

Although the mobile phone was first invented so that people could talk to one another more easily, mobile speaking devices are now mobile texting devices. Calling and leaving voice messages is almost extinct.

Technology has given us the gift of speed and convenience but, in the process, it has begun to strip us of our ability to connect – and connection is what is vital to the human soul.

We live in an age when people are desperate for human connection but, because they are so glued to their phones and computers, they are losing the vital skills that enable them to forge such a bond.

It is only when we talk to someone that we are able to build a clearer picture of what they are truly saying and, importantly, meaning. That contact gives us a glimpse into a person’s personality. We can hear the complexity that makes up their character.

Messaging is transactional unless you have the gift of poetry. Something said in a text can have a completely different meaning from the same thing said on the phone or in person.

For some time now, having seen the growing trend to communicate with people only via text or email, I have been running my own private campaign to try to save people from themselves.

In my company, The Black Farmer, no matter your rank, everyone has to do their turn on customer service – and that means picking up the phone and speaking to someone.

Obviously this intern didn’t get the memo. Perhaps I should have emailed. I see every day how this customer-service approach pays dividends, as most people are so grateful that we bother to phone them.

I fear this problem of a younger generation, uneducated in how to connect with people, means that those of us who grew up navigating human interaction at every turn will be called upon in our older years to pass on those skills.

Companies that thought it wise to manage people of a certain age out of their business will soon realise they have a human-resources problem: a young workforce that has evolved to become so like the machines they worship that they have forgotten that most human art of connection.

Farmer’s union: Wilfred and the Dartmoor Border Morris Dancers on his Devon farm

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones is a farmer and founder of The Black Farmer food range