February 13, 2025
When you come down with a cold or you lose an employee for a few days due to an illness, it can have a high cost for your business. With flu season hitting twice, sometimes three times a year, you must be prepared. Sick days cause more than just an annoyance when it comes to scheduling. They can be very devastating to your business.
What happens if the person you usually have answering your phones is out sick? Does this mean everybody else has to pick up the slack? Will that put the rest of your staff behind on their work?
No matter how you look at it, sick days can set your business back in a hurry. You only have two major commodities to work with for your business: Money and Time. When sick days pile up, you lose very valuable time you cannot get back.
Instead of letting sick days pile up and become a devastation, you can be proactive. There are ways to plan for sick days and take the pressure of your business and your employees. Here’s one way you can make sure the work doesn’t pile up and customers don’t become neglected because somebody is out sick.
Hiring a Virtual Receptionist Team
A virtual receptionist team can help bail you out when sick days start to stack up. You know if one employee gets sick and misses a few days, it’s only a matter of time before you have two or three out in a row. This doesn’t happen with virtual receptionist services because you have an entire team.
When you hire a virtual receptionist team, if one of them gets sick, the rest of the team covers their calls. Since you have multiple people answering your incoming calls, your business won’t miss a beat.
Even if you decide you prefer to use an in-house receptionist for most of your incoming calls, a virtual receptionist can fill in with sick days. They can also cover lunch breaks, vacations and overflow calls during busy times. Since you only pay for the time they are on the phone, you won’t need to shell out another salary just to ensure your phones are answered.
The Fringe Benefit of a Virtual Receptionist
When your receptionist goes down sick, the rest of your staff is left with the interruption of answering the phone. This makes it hard for necessary work to get done on time and can upset both employees and customers.
With a virtual receptionist, you gain the fringe benefit of never turning the phones over to busy employees. Instead, they can continue to work on their tasks, while the virtual receptionist covers the phone calls. This is one of the easiest ways to protect the very valuable time you have and make sure it’s used properly for the benefit of your business.
No More Paying for Overtime
As a small business, overtime can be an expense that is minimal in your budget. When sick days hit, you may need to cover shifts and phones with overworked employees going into overtime. Not only does this mean you have to pay them more, but it also means the quality of the work will most likely suffer.
Adding a virtual receptionist service to your team will help to keep overtime to a minimum. Since you won’t have to count on other employees to answer the phone, they can remain productive, happy and working their normal hours without the added stress of overtime.
Sick days add up fast and so does the overtime you have to pay on top of paying the employee out sick. You can lessen the financial hit by using a virtual receptionist team to cover the incoming calls.
Even if the employee out sick isn’t your receptionist, you can move your receptionist around to cover another employees tasks as the virtual reception team takes care of your calls. You don’t want to miss important calls or miss a beat when somebody goes out sick. A virtual receptionist service can help to ensure your business continues running smoothly, even during flu season.
If you don’t want to suffer the high cost of sick days, consider using a virtual receptionist team for your incoming calls. Remember, they can also help cover lunch breaks, vacation time, personal days and after hours calls.
