The Silent Gap: How Avoiding a Paper Trail Hurts Workplace Efficiency

Barriers to communication.

Introduction

In workplaces across industries, the choice between sending an email and making a phone call may seem trivial. After all, both are legitimate communication tools. Yet beneath that choice lies a significant behavioral pattern – many employees and managers deliberately opt for verbal conversations to avoid creating a written record. While this decision may feel safer at the moment, especially for those anxious about their writing skills or fearful of leaving behind proof of a mistake, it can lead to long-term inefficiencies, increased error rates, and diminished organizational performance.

The reluctance to create a “paper trail” isn’t new. From the earliest adoption of workplace email, researchers observed managers avoiding sensitive topics in writing for fear of political fallout or legal discovery.¹ Today, the avoidance extends well beyond HR or personnel issues. In daily business operations – project planning, client updates, resource allocation, the same avoidance behavior often plays out, and the costs are far greater than most realize.

Why People Avoid Written Communication

1. Fear of Poor Writing Skills

Not everyone in the workforce feels confident drafting clear, professional messages. Written communication exposes grammar, spelling, and tone in a way spoken interaction does not. Employees who fear being judged for mistakes in their writing may prefer to “just talk it out” rather than risk a poorly worded email.

For some, this avoidance stems from self-consciousness: research on workplace communication competence shows that employees with lower self-assessed writing ability often report higher communication anxiety.² The permanence of written text compounds that anxiety—it can be read multiple times, forwarded to others, or used as a reference in performance reviews.

2. Avoidance of Accountability

The second, and perhaps more potent, driver is the desire for plausible deniability. Written records create a fixed, attributable statement; they can be retrieved, timestamped, and traced to a specific sender. If a project fails, an error occurs, or a decision is challenged, written proof can assign responsibility clearly.

Studies in organizational communication and philosophy of language have detailed how speakers exploit the ephemeral nature of oral exchanges to preserve deniability.³ Without a transcript, a person can claim they were misunderstood, misquoted, or never said something at all.

3. Technostress is a thing

Reluctance to produce written records can stem from more than just personnel concerns, it often reflects broader workplace habits and perceptions. Employees may default to verbal exchanges because they feel they are faster, less formal, or less risky than committing something to writing. While this can work for quick updates, it leaves little trace for accountability or reference, creating gaps in communication.

Fear of technology, often called technostress, adds another layer to this reluctance. Some employees feel uneasy using digital tools for written communication, worrying about making mistakes, leaving a permanent record, or navigating unfamiliar systems. This digitalization anxiety can lead to avoidance of written channels altogether, pushing teams toward memory-dependent, undocumented interactions. Over time, this undermines clarity, slows resolution of disputes, and erodes the reliability of institutional knowledge.⁴

The Organizational Cost of Avoiding Written Records

When an instruction, agreement, or specification exists only in someone’s memory, the probability of error increases. This problem is magnified in complex projects involving multiple stakeholders and timelines.

Repeated Clarification Requests

Without a written record to consult, employees must repeatedly return to the original speaker – often a manager or team lead – for clarification. This interrupts both the worker’s productivity and the manager’s workflow. Over time, the cumulative effect is substantial.

Imagine a construction project manager verbally outlining ten steps for a subcontractor. The subcontractor, unsure about step six two days later, must call back. Multiply that by dozens of tasks and team members, and you have hours of lost time each week.

Loss of Knowledge Continuity

If a team member leaves, any knowledge they held verbally vanishes with them. In contrast, written records provide continuity, allowing new personnel to understand what decisions were made and why.

Increased Risk of Conflict

Verbal agreements are fertile ground for disputes. Without documentation, disagreements devolve into conflicting recollections: “You said X.” - “No, I said Y.” This not only strains relationships but can stall progress while the team attempts to reconstruct what was agreed upon.

Research Evidence: Verbal vs. Written in Business Contexts

Several studies and reports shed light on the consequences of channel choice in workplace communication:

M. Lynne Markus’s early studies on email adoption found that managers deliberately avoided email for sensitive matters, knowing it created a permanent record.⁵ This avoidance, while protective in some contexts, also removed a source of shared reference for routine operations.

Frontiers in Psychology (2022) analyzed how communicators craft messages that allow for plausible deniability and how listeners process denials.⁶ The research supports the idea that verbal-only exchanges can be used strategically to avoid blame.

Synthese (2024) provides a philosophical framework for how one can make intentions clear in conversation without leaving evidence that would prove intent.⁷ This applies directly to verbal workplace directives.

NBER workplace harassment study demonstrated that employees were more likely to report sensitive issues when plausible deniability was guaranteed through methods like distorted verbal reporting—proof that communication channels shape willingness to share information.⁸

Beyond HR: Everyday Business Applications

While the tendency to avoid written records is obvious in HR-sensitive or legal contexts, it is just as prevalent in routine operations:

Sales negotiations: Some salespeople prefer calls over email to discuss pricing flexibility, avoiding a written offer that could be forwarded or used in competing bids.

Project specifications: A product manager might explain requirements over the phone rather than document them in the project management system, reducing the risk of those requirements being blamed if the product fails.

Vendor agreements: Verbal understandings on delivery dates or payment terms can be “adjusted” later because there’s no email to contradict the new version.

In each case, the absence of a record forces future actions to depend on memory and goodwill – both of which are unreliable.

The Inefficiency Problem

From a systems perspective, the constant need to reconfirm details verbally creates a drag on productivity:

Time Lost: Each clarification interrupts the worker’s flow and requires the manager to re-explain.

Decision Bottlenecks: Workers may halt progress until clarification arrives, stalling dependent tasks.

Cognitive Load: Relying on memory alone increases mental strain, reducing accuracy and efficiency.

This inefficiency compounds across teams, especially in fast-moving industries where details shift daily.

The blame game.

Cultural and Managerial Roots

The reluctance to create a paper trail often reflects deeper cultural or managerial issues:

Fear-Based Leadership: In organizations where mistakes are punished harshly, employees may avoid documentation to protect themselves from blame.

Low Writing Culture: Workplaces that do not prioritize written communication training may inadvertently encourage verbal-only exchanges.

Legacy Norms: In some industries, “a handshake and a word” remain valued over formal documentation, even when modern tools are available.

Addressing the Fear of Written Communication

If poor writing skills are a barrier, organizations can take steps to build confidence:

Offer Writing Workshops: Focus on clarity, brevity, and professional tone rather than grammar perfectionism.

Provide Templates: Standardize common message types (status updates, meeting recaps) to reduce the cognitive load of starting from scratch.

Promote a No-Blame Documentation Culture: Emphasize that written records are tools for alignment, not ammunition for fault-finding.

Balancing Verbal and Written Channels

Verbal communication has undeniable advantages: it’s faster for complex back-and-forth exchanges, conveys tone better, and fosters rapport. But without complementary written follow-up, it leaves organizations vulnerable to error and inefficiency.

A balanced approach:

Discuss verbally, confirm in writing. After a call, send a quick email recap: “To confirm, here’s what we agreed…”

Use collaborative platforms. Tools like Slack, Teams, or project management software create searchable, shared histories.

Document decisions, not every word. Capturing the outcome of a conversation is enough to create accountability without overburdening staff.

Conclusion

Avoiding a paper trail may feel safer at the moment – especially for those anxious about their writing skills or concerned about accountability – but it creates hidden costs that ripple through projects and organizations. Incomplete records lead to mistakes, inefficiencies, and repeated interruptions, all of which erode productivity and profitability.

The solution is not to abandon verbal communication but to integrate it into a documentation culture that values clarity, continuity, and shared understanding. By reframing written records as a tool for success rather than a weapon for blame, organizations can reduce fear, build competence, and close the silent gap that’s slowing them down.

References

1. Markus, M. L. (1994). Electronic mail as the medium of managerial choice. Organization Science, 5(4), 502–527.

2. MacLeod, M., & Stockdale, R. (2020). Communication apprehension in workplace writing. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly.

3. Bonalumi, F., et al. (2022). Communication and deniability. Frontiers in Psychology.

4. Pfaffinger, Katharina F., Julia A. M. Reif, Erika Spieß, and Rita Berger. “Anxiety in a Digitalised Work Environment.” Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie 51 (2020): 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11612-020-00502-4.

5. Markus, M. L. (1994). See above.

6. Bonalumi, F., et al. (2022). See above.

7. Peet, A. (2024). The puzzle of plausible deniability. Synthese.

8. Cullen, Z., et al. (2020). Monitoring harassment in organizations. NBER Working Paper.