Field notes › Running the business
The phone-call tax: what "who's coming tomorrow" costs you
The calls you stop noticing
Every labour hire office has a background hum of the same few calls. A worker asking what time he starts Thursday. A site supervisor asking who is coming tomorrow. Someone checking whether their flight is booked. A client chasing a request they made last week. None of these calls is a problem on its own. The problem is that they never stop.
Because each call is short, nobody counts them. They do not appear on any invoice or timesheet. That is what makes them a tax rather than a cost: paid constantly, in small amounts, by the people whose time is worth the most.
A call costs more than its minutes
The obvious cost is the time on the phone. The real cost is bigger, for a few reasons.
- Interruption. The person answering is usually mid-way through building a roster or sorting a mobilisation. Each call drags them out of that work, and getting back into it takes longer than the call did.
- The answers are verbal. A start time given over the phone leaves no record. If it is misheard, the mistake surfaces at the gate the next morning, not in the office where it could be fixed quietly.
- It follows you home. Roster questions do not keep office hours. The Sunday night call about Monday's shift lands on whoever owns the spreadsheet, and it lands forever, because they are the only one who can answer it.
Why the calls exist at all
People do not ring you for fun. They ring because ringing is the only way to get the answer. The roster lives in a file in the office, the worker cannot see it, and the client cannot see it, so every question has to route through a human who can.
That means the fix is not answering faster, and it is not a better after-hours mobile arrangement. The fix is making the answer available without you in the middle.
Answer the question before it's asked
Mustr does this from two directions. Workers get a portal that works on any phone, no app to install, where they can see their own shifts, register interest in open shifts, set their availability and upload certificates. The worker who wants to know Thursday's start time can look it up himself in less time than the call would have taken to dial. The details are at worker portal.
Clients get the same self-service from the other side. Each client site logs in and sees its own live roster, raises shift requests through the portal, and ticks off flights and accommodation on the shift itself. The supervisor asking who is coming tomorrow can see exactly who is coming tomorrow, tonight, without ringing anyone.
Because everyone is reading the same live roster, the answers are also consistent. Nobody is quoted a start time from an out-of-date printout, because there is no printout. Everyone quotes the roster itself, and the roster is always current.
What is left when the hum stops
Some calls should survive. A worker flagging a problem, a client talking about next month's crewing, anything with judgement in it. Those are the calls you want your senior people taking, and they are exactly the calls that get squeezed out when the routine ones fill the day.
You do not need to measure your own phone-call tax precisely to know you are paying it. Ask whoever runs your roster how often they answer a question the caller could have answered themselves with the right access. Then book a demo and see what your week looks like without those calls in it.