Thanks for the 6am wake-up call Gartner!

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Our VP of marketing came to work grumpy the other day. It seems she got an unexpected 6am call on her personal mobile phone from a European Gartner Sales Rep. The guy robbed Nancy (our VPM) of an hour’s sleep and interrupted her personal time. Nancy gets to the office early, stays late and works hard … and she values her sleep. It’s easy to understand why she didn’t appreciate the work-related wake-up call. She asked the sales rep if he realized he was calling her at 6:00 a.m. No he said apologetically – he thought he was calling the east cost

To be fair, how was the poor Brit to know that Nancy didn’t work on the east coast anymore? The contact information he was using was actually for the company she worked for previously – which was headquartered in Florida. Clearly he thought it was a comfy 9am in her time zone, and safe to ring.

But the fact is this early-morning incident happened because, prior to DiVitas, Nancy’s personal mobile phone doubled as her primary business contact number. DiVitas makes you reachable by a single contact number whether you are in or away from your office – your deskphone. Folks who juggle both a mobile phone and deskphone leave it up to the caller to decide the best way to reach you. Given the choice, the safer bet is the mobile phone, since it follows you home (and you leave the deskphone on the desk). However if those callers opt for your mobile phone, and they get their time zones mixed up – as Gartner did with Nancy – the consequences are un-fun.

Coincidentally, I recently read an article lamenting this very problem, and I was really surprised that the advice was so dark ages (technology-wise). According to It’s a Wireless World , all you need to do is switch the damn Blackberry off after-hours so you won’t be bothered. The article quotes John McManus, the Commerce Department’s deputy chief information officer and CTO as complaining that mobile devices create new work/life issues. In fact, he refers to his phone as “the little demon device.”

McManus actually programs his mobile phone to turn itself off in the evening and on in the morning. In a nighttime emergency, his staff knows to reach him by using a traditional wireline phone rather than sending an e-mail message or a text message.

That sounds to me like a solution for getting some privacy, but not for solving business problems.

In any case, this wake-up call incident is, well, a wake-up call. It demonstrates why having a single contact number – like what DiVitas users have – is the best way to improve productivity while managing work/life balance.

DiVitas extends the deskphone capabilities to the mobile phone, enabling contact to be made to a DiVitas user consistently through their PBX extension. This makes reaching a DiVitas user anytime, anywhere consistent and straightforward. Now DiVitas users can place their corporate number on their business cards and be guaranteed not to miss important calls. And if that individual leaves the company – both sides win. Similar to deskphones, the company, not the individual, receives all future business calls placed to that number.

Having to juggle a Blackberry when you’re mobile, and a deskphone (with separate phone number) when you’re in-office, is far more confusing than being reachable by a single number, on a single device. Nancy used to be a multi-phone juggler – one in the office, one on her person – but not since working at DiVitas.

Nancy’s biggest challenge now? It’s not fretting about whether there was an urgent call she missed. Nope. If her phone rings after hours and the call appears to be important, she answers. If not, she doesn’t. Her challenging is simply to maintain her contact info from bygone days so she can be assured a good night’s sleep. That’s not so hard.