Giving out Personal Contact details at work.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

How many of our members do that? At my old job we were expected to provide all our personal details to the personnel departments, but these were not given out to others.

I have given my personal mob and home number to clients on occassion, as a sort of backup to my “work” mob (or Crackberry!), however its not something I encourage or do often. What about you? I like to keep my home and professional lives seperate, I often switch my blackberry off when I am at home, or check e-mails only once or twice. My time is my time.

2

I don’t have a problem with it – I’ve never had random phone calls or emails from a coworker – and it’s nice to have the info if, for instance, I need a ride to work or something.

3

HR, of course, asks for the info, and they have it. They’ve never needed to contact me directly, though.

Aside from that, work friends who I see outside of work get personal contact details. I work when I’m at work, and I don’t work when I’m not at work.

4

I should mention that i did give out my personal contact details to several co workers, but only those who were close to me and secondly rarely if ever to clients.

I am interested in finding out your practice. To expand upon the OP

  1. Do you give out detailss to

i) co-workers?
and/or
ii) Clients

finally

iii) Professional Contacts

Secondly what area of work are you?

My answer

1(i) Yes , to a few

1(ii) I can remember two, out of many who I dealt with on a regular basis

1(iii) A few, some who I knew socially as well.

  1. I am a Lawyer.
5

One of my hats at work is network administrator.

We have 55 users, and they all have my cell #.

I am impressed at how rarely I get off-hours calls.

6

I work from home and we use a paid-for toll free number system that routes calls to whatever phone we choose. So in theory, even though I get calls on my cell none of my clients have my cell #.

However, some times I call people and they just slap my callerID number in to their phonebooks or whatever, and they call me back using the number I called from. Even though I leave the toll free number. It’s not the case that they are calling me RIGHT back - they store the number and use it the next time they get ahold of me.

I’ve gotten a few weekend and nightime calls at my home/cell number, and that makes me furious. So now every time I call a client, I have to dial in to the toll free number system then dial out from there to “mask” my real number. I also have to pay to do it this way.

And, for the record, when a client calls and leaves a voicemail I get their call-from number on caller ID. I only ever call the number they left in voicemail.

7

At the risk of hijacking the thread, I just want to say thank you very much for doing this. It really grinds my gears when people complain about how difficult it was to call me back. Their caller ID will show some generic switchboard number, but in my voicemail, I’ll clearly say “Please call me back at xxx-xxx-xxxx.” This is usually done at least twice during the message; sometimes I add some spice and go with “My direct number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.”

If you don’t leave me a number in your voicemail, then all bets are off, and I’ll rely on my previously saved contact information (first), or your caller ID (second) to try to get in touch with you.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to slap someone who’s said “I got your message; I would’ve called sooner, but it took me 20 minutes to navigate the chain of machine prompts and operators it takes to get to you!”

8

Aw, man, sore spot for me.

We have a list with everyone’s address, phone number, spouse’s name and phone number, and names of all the employee’s children. I am not married and have no kids and I kicked up quite a fuss when they would not list my dogs under “children.” :wink: (Not to imply that dogs should be equated with children.) Birthdays are also on that list. Everyone gets a copy and a lot of people post it on their bulletin boards.

It only takes one visitor with nefarious motives to snag that list and start up somewhere around 25 new credit lines in all of our names. I started squawking about it, loudly, and people started keeping their lists in their desk drawers, which caused me to begrudgingly shut up about it.

Consequently, I made a personal policy of refusing to share this information. You can have my cell phone number in case I’m working from home, but that’s the extent of the privacy violation I’ll allow.

We had this now-long-gone Boss Lady who circulated a new IT permissions form that we all had to sign. My employer has a contract with this client to supply two warm bodies (me + one other) to their office, so even though I am not an employee of this organization, I still had to sign the form to continue to have access to e-mail and the server. The form asked for my home address and phone number, which I refused to give.

I was called into Boss Lady’s office and threatened with my job over “not signing the form.” I argued that I had, in fact, signed the form and had provided *all *the information that IT would need to set up the proper accounts with proper permissions for me. I pointed out that I am not an employee of this organization and that we both knew damn well that no IT guy anywhere needs to know where I live or what my home phone number is, in order to provide e-mail/server/internet access. And if Boss Lady needs that information, she can call my employer’s HR office in Texas, good luck getting my personal information outta them. (And P.S. The IT Department at my company in Texas doesn’t have my personal address or home number either.)

She then reported me to my boss (in Texas) for insubordination, and continued to insist that I’d refused to sign the form… which I’d cleverly kept a copy of… with my signature on it. I actually had to fly to Texas to meet with HR and plead my case. They were so shocked and appalled at the required security-violating demands, the never took action against me and Boss Lady was fired, er, I mean, promoted (state government employee) to another position a few months later and the whole drama became a non-issue.

9

HR should have your personal contact information, and an alternate emergency contact. The need for it arises often enough to make this a sound practice.

If business requires you be reached out of the office, the company should provide the means of contact. This is not always followed, but is a good idea.

10

My supervisor has my personal information, including phone numbers. We are required to leave a valid phone number if we call in sick.
So far I have only received a phone call from a supervisor once, and it was a good thing. I hadn’t called in as I was extremely ill and couldn’t get to the phone. She called my Mom who came over and took me to the hospital.

I never give my phone number to clients (see the “Ask the Child Support Officer” thread). When I worked for a smaller county I often ran into clients at the grocery store, Target, walking around town. I would talk for a few minutes, then suggest they call during work hours. I have had a client track me down, lie to my landlord to obtain my home phone number, then call and leave threats on my voicemail. The police put a stop to that.

11

I’m a pilot, at work we have an electronic roster accessible by anyone with an internet connection and a username/password. As well as the roster itself there is also an area that shows individual’s “currency”. This primarily has information on things that expire such as licenses, medical certificates, recent hours, approaches, and landings flown etc. This is very important because if one of these things has expired then we can’t legally work. It also happens to have your name, date of birth, mobile phone number, and home phone number. So everyone’s phone contact details are available for anyone else to see.

We also have an online version of Microsoft Outlook and everyone’s work phone numbers are supplied plus mobile phone numbers if the employee has chosen to enter it into the database.

So yep, my phone number is available to everyone I work with. I don’t have a problem with it and haven’t heard of anyone else having a problem with it. I only get phone calls for emergencies as everyone understands that our days off are our days off and aren’t to be needlessly interrupted.

Finally crews will also give each other their mobile numbers when away on a trip so we can contact each other if needed.

To answer your specific questions,

i. Yes as needed but they all have access anyway
ii. I don’t have clients.
iii. Not as a matter of course.

12

Here in Jakarta it is routine to put your personal mobile phone number on your business cards. In our context, this makes sense for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that you are constantly giving out your business cards to people for social purposes. (I’m sure you’ve all heard stories about the importance of business cards in Asian culture - it’s all true.)

13

I have to be available at a moment’s notice twenty-four seven. About twice a year I get woken up and a voice says, “We have a situation,” and then I’m off on a whirlwind of espionage and dashing adventures.

Or something like that.

Anyway it means that my employer and one of our clients has my personal number handy and I don’t care because being woken up and dealing with situations when I’d rather be asleep in my bed is part of the job. In the past other employers have also had home contact information because sometimes things happen and they need to reach me, though in those cases I haven’t given clients information.

14

From my limited experience, the US seems to give out personal details more easily, as opposed tom other places. Or is the concept of “work contact, personal contacts” less applicable there.

15

When I worked for a large engineering company, personal contact details were known to HR and nobody else. Managers could get things like home phone number if an emergency were to come up. That was back before the days of cell phones. That was a place where I worked strictly 8 - to -5.

When I worked for the City, they provided me with a pager; later on, a cell phone. I shared these numbers with citizens and work mates since the City paid for the phone and I was technically “on call” 24/7.

Now that I have my own business, my cell phone number is on my business card. It is the best way for clients to contact me, besides email. I have a home office with a land line but I’m not always there.

In all these cases, it’s no stretch to be able to find someone’s home phone number and address from the telephone book, if it’s not an unlisted number.

To answer the questions:

  1. Yes, I give my cell phone number out to clients, other consultants I work with, and other professional contacts.

  2. I am a consulting Civil Engineer.

16

I’m in insurance sales. The only people with my personal cell # are the exec I work with, my supervisor and the office admin. None of my customers have any of my personal contact info and don’t need it.

17

Those who need it, sure. We’re a small team, the network has to run 24/7 and the job is too big for all of us to be experts in all areas. When something breaks and needs fixing the job pretty much goes where it needs to go.

My “clients” are mostly internal users and they’re not getting my extension, let alone my home phone number. The helpdesk is there for a reason. If the problem involves me, it’s probably affecting a few hundred people and in that case, the last thing I need is dozens of phone calls with status requests and problem reports.

Nope. They can email me.
2. I am a senior network engineer, working for a large media company.

18

I used to order work (during my day) that would be done on graveyard, so yes, I gave out my contact information for 2 am calls. It just seems respectful to the workers since they’re there during dark-thirty, that I’m reachable.

I’m not very good at keeping the work/friend line separate - I’ve got lots of friends I picked up at work.

19

I remember a company I worked at that actually went and tested their employees contact information. They told us we’d be getting calls at home at some point over the next week or so. I asked the department manager why they were doing this and was told “It’s in case there is an emergency we need to notify you about”. I asked her “something like ‘Hey, your work’s on fire! Bring marshmallows’”. She got a good laugh out of that.

This was right around the time we were doing disaster recovery. Apparently if the building did get leveled, they’d (theoretically) be able to direct us to another location and we could hit the ground running. Since no one I knew had any idea where the alternate site was, and many people took the bus to work, this could’ve been a problem. I guess the answer to that was “the whole thing’s theoretical anyway, so there’s no point in addressing that issue”.

20

My boss has my cell phone number and my husband’s cell phone number. I frequently serve as her backup, so she may need to get in touch with me quickly. She has never abused this. I have her cell number as well.