Help me! What to do about too many personal calls
Lola815
225 Posts
What can I do about employees getting too many personal calls at work. We tried to make it emergency only calls, but that didn't work. Sometimes it just gets out of control! Any suggestions??
Comments
Not knowing the size and nature of your business, how does the receptionist determine calls to be personal, as ee's/friends/family can sometimes be very creative? Do you also monitor outgoing calls?
It would be very difficult for our office to enforce a strict policy. The guidelines address the term "excessive", but that can be very subjective.
That said, I think a more humane focus would be on how employees taking personal calls affects the ability to complete the employer's work in a timely fashion. If the calls aren't interfering with work-related calls, costing the employer anything, shifting work to other unwilling employees, and the employees are still getting their work done in a timely manner, where's the harm? Our jobs keep most of us at work for a long time, usually during the time of day when banks and other businesses also have their operating hours. If employees are to accomplish any necessary personal tasks via telephone, like scheduling appointments, a daytime call is often the only option.
We have a policy in place and enforce it for all employees regardless. I'd suggest putting together some type of no tolerance policy against excessive personal calls. As long as you are treating everyone equally and not singling out anyone, it should help with the problem. If you have a progressive disciplinary policy, use it. If you don't, create one. This way you counsel the employee, verbally warn them, write it up, suspend, then fire. Do you have the ability to print a phone log? Sometimes the employee stops when they "see" just how much of their day is spent on personal phone calls. A minute here and there do add up. I've had employees suprised that they've spent so much time on the phone during the course of a week.
One last note...your supervisors and managers...need to MANAGE. I've found that if they don't peek their head out of their office every so often, problems start to arise. Employees are less apt to "take advantage" when their supervisor "walks the floor" every so often.
Good Luck
Side note from earlier posts: making people punch out for personal calls or other breaks seems appealing but has its pitfalls. The FLSA won't allow you to dock pay for someone on a break of 20 minutes or less....If the phone calls, smoke breaks, other breaks, etc, are less than 20 minutes, you have just opened up another, perhaps bigger can of worms.
Lori
Making employees keep calls to breaks and lunch only is a great idea for hourly employees, but our salaired employees don't have two designated 15 minute breaks, and they are the ones with cell phones and direct line, so how do you handle them? Or can you just ignore the salaired and focus on the hourly?
>for hourly employees, but our salaired employees don't have two
>designated 15 minute breaks, and they are the ones with cell phones
>and direct line, so how do you handle them? Or can you just ignore
>the salaired and focus on the hourly?
Lola,
Again it goes back to your policy and procedures that are in place. They are there for not only your hourly employees, but for ALL employees. Do you have a way to print a log of all the calls (if it's the company phone?) If not, it again comes back to your managers to "manage" their employees by making themselves aware of how much time any employee is spending on personal business, be it phone calls or other personal issues. I would never 'ignore' a problem hoping it'll go away. It may seem like we're running a daycare at times, but if your employees want to act like children, we need to treat them as such. I hate to sound so harsh, but we're dealing with the same issues at my company. It usually comes down to a manager who 'ignored' the problem for so long that now it's a problem when they try to enforce the rules that were there all along. Then they come to HR saying, "well why can't we just fire them? They've been doing this for (months, years, etc.)." Talk about what I dislike about the job! Trying to make a manager understand that without documentation to back up our claim...well you all know, it's like talking to a brick wall.
I'm off my soap box now, sorry for ranting. Guess I needed it today.
x:-8
We can't get a log from our phone system, so that is out of the question.