Or - yikes - doing work, instead of just communicating about work.

I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but for a lot of distributed companies, it just isn't realistic for people to get on the phone every time they need to talk to one another.

Wasn't too serious

But ...

For distributed companies: email for async communications, phone for sync. If you need to bother someone immediately you might as well have a high bandwidth audio (or even video) call.