YOU don’t have time to police every phone call made by your staff. But that doesn’t stop you losing thousands of rand a month if you have one or two staff members who abuse the phones in your office.

So what can you do? You need to lay down some ground rules with your staff. Start with two general rules that all staff will find reasonable and easy to apply:

• Instruct staff not to make personal calls on business phones unless they are crucial.

• Instruct staff not to spend more than a minute or two on those personal calls that cannot be avoided. Simple. No-one has to prepare or read detailed policy guidelines on what they can and can’t do, or argue with you about how to interpret the policy.

This allows an employee who is a mother, for instance, to phone home at a certain time of day to check if her children are safely back from school.

This sort of call is important and it is pointless for her to have to ask permission every day to make the call.

In a small business, personal dynamics are very important – you are working very closely all day with the same people; so you don’t want to make staff feel like you don’t trust them.

At the same time, however, you do need systems to monitor phone calls so that you can see exactly where a problem is if one does arise. More about monitoring later.

Call blocking

Step number one is to make sure that your office phone is blocked to national and international calls. Telkom can provide you with a service that allows you to make these calls only when you key in a secret code.

You can then decide which of your staff are authorised to make these long-distance calls and provide just those people with the code.

Call records

Then comes monitoring: having asked for your staff’s co-operation, you still need to monitor calls to ensure that your instructions are complied with.

To do this, you need to have your office telephone bill ‘itemised’. For an extra fee, Telkom will include with your invoice a detailed list of all the calls made from your phone lines each month.

If you have a more advanced switchboard system, your system provider will also give you this sort of information and much more. It is well worth the extra charge – which should not be more than a few rand a month.

This gives you the comfort of knowing exactly which numbers were dialed, when each call was made, and how long each call lasted.

You need to also let your staff know that a record of all calls is being kept, so that they know that they cannot abuse the system with impunity.

In most small businesses, this list of calls should not be too long to spend a few minutes each month scanning through the list.

You should be looking for calls that last longer than five or ten minutes (most business calls shouldn’t last longer than this); make a note of the numbers that these calls are made to.

If they keep occurring more than once or twice a week, find out who the number belongs to (you can just dial the number yourself to find this out).

Cell phone calls

Before the advent of cellular phones, the main contributor to high phone costs were long-distance calls.

Today, however, calls to cellular numbers are responsible for as much as half of your total phone bill – and those cellular phones owners are often in your local area.

There are two important responses to this problem:

The first is to sensitise your staff to the cost of cellular phone calls. In South Africa, ours are among the highest in the world, and will remain that way until more competition is introduced to the local cellular phone industry.

Establish a habit among your staff to phone a land-line first, before just dialing a person on their cell phone.

This is possible if the call is not urgent, and if the person has a reliable office that will take a message and pass it on. Once again, this will require monitoring of your monthly account.

The second is to streamline the cost of your cell phone calls. This can be done using a least-cost routing system, which ensures that your cellphone calls do not attract any extra charges by going through Telkom’s land- lines

Distance calls

The cost of calls to other parts of South Africa – and to other countries – are coming down in price as competition to Telkom draws nearer.

If you spend a substantial amount on calls around the country, investigate new packages that allow you to pay a set monthly rate.