Ruby’s taking a road trip! We’ll be exhibiting at the ABA TECHSHOW March 29-31st! Stop on by booth #513 and say hello to our friendly sales team, Diana Stepleton and Ashley Fisher. Ruby Founder and CEO Jill Nelson and our Director of Marketing Kevin Gillam will also be making the rounds!
Aren’t attending and would like to check out the vendors? Click here for a free pass to the EXPO!
If you’re in the Chicago area and would like to meet up, please drop us a line! We’d love to see you!
Our team is beaming with pride after our win!
This award is one that we really hold near and dear to our hearts, because it is in large part based on a survey of our employees. It really means the world to us to know that we are achieving the mission of our Core Values and creating a happy work environment for our team. We are honored to learn we were #2 in the categories of Management and Communications and Decision-Making and Trust. It’s definitely a testament to the fabulous managers and leadership here at Ruby, and we are lucky to have them on our team!
We are always striving to be better for our employees. We stepped up our game this year with some awesome new benefits. We added a six-week paid maternity and paternity leave, our “Five at Five” paid sabbatical program, increased the amount of paid time off for our staff (by a whole extra week!), and expanded our wellness program. So, what’s next for the Ruby team? The sky is the limit!
If you are an avid Watercooler reader, I am sure you know by now that our team of virtual receptionists needs no excuse to celebrate and share a little happiness. Lucky for us, today is Valentine’s Day, and it is the perfect reason to celebrate and share a little sweetness! To spread a little love to our coworkers, we hosted a Valentine’s sweet treat potluck. Our kitchen is overflowing with amazing baked goods and candies made by our multitalented staff, and one of our wonderful local clients brought in some goodies for our virtual receptionist team, too! A few saccharine snapshots from the Ruby office:
Tasia, Ang, and Jewel share a laugh over a dinosaur cookie
Monica D, Ashley, Ash, Suzi, Ang, and Kristin enjoy the sweet treats!
Much love to our clients and staff! How are you celebrating Valentine’s Day this year?
Ruby at the 2011 "Best Companies to Work For" event
To further support our unique Core Values, we are incredibly excited to launch a new sabbatical program at Ruby Receptionists: the “Five at Five!”
In this paid sabbatical program, for every five years at Ruby, our virtual receptionists and supporting staff members will receive five weeks paid time off! During their Five at Five, Rubys are encouraged to explore our Core Values — “Foster Happiness,” “Create Community,” “Innovate,” and “Practice WOWism” – and apply them to a dream that they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to realize.
We really want our employees to succeed, so Ruby will also provide grants and coaching so that they may thrive in their Five at Five. Ruby will fund a $1,000 grant to help each employee accomplish their goal, whether that means traveling around Europe, taking a class, volunteering with a nonprofit, or anything else that would make them deeply happy. Each employee will also meet with positive psychology experts Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener and Positive Acorn in an individual coaching session to discuss his or her aspirations and strategies for making them a reality through the Five at Five program.
Traditionally, sabbaticals have been reserved for global organizations and academic institutions, and as a small business, we are thrilled to be able to offer them to our staff. In fact, when CEO Jill Nelson announced her sabbatical brainchild at our January staff meeting, many Rubys were so surprised that she had to repeat the idea. Once it sunk in, everyone got very excited and a few got a little misty. Virtual receptionist Eve T. explained, “The way Ruby genuinely cares about us and our happiness never ceases to amaze me and warm my heart. This program only furthers my love for working here, and I am already looking forward to sharing my story when I hit my fifth year!” Star Service and Receptionist Cultivator Janel Hodge will be celebrating her five year anniversary with Ruby in November, and she expressed how much this means to her, saying, “A burst of ideas came to mind immediately, and I got especially emotional when Jill announced the coaching session. I love working for Ruby, so I wouldn’t want to leave to accomplish one of my other lifelong dreams — and now I won’t have to!”
The Five at Five joins other beneficial programs at Ruby, such as our paid maternity/paternity leave, employer-matched 401k, and Alternative Transportation program. This year alone, 15% of Ruby employees will be eligible to take advantage of this new, unique paid sabbatical.
Fostering happiness is a big part of our business: when our virtual receptionists are happy, callers are happy, and our clients are happy! And when we invest in our staff’s happiness, they stay with us longer and are in turn invested in making Ruby successful; in fact, the average receptionist has been with us almost a year and a half (exceptional in a field where high turnover is the norm), and all but five of our 70 employees started out as virtual receptionists.
We are committed to living our Core Values, and we can’t wait to see what each bright, talented Ruby will do with their Five at Five!
Carolyn Elefant’s Solo by Choice: How to Be the Lawyer You Always Wanted to Be is an incredible resource for solo attorneys, and we at Ruby® are extremely grateful to have been mentioned in her new edition! In her chapter on Office Technology, Elefant discusses the plethora of phone options out there as well as the dilemma of who will answer your phone: a live receptionist, a voicemail system, or an answering service.
If you decide to go with the latter, she suggests that you, ”[s]elect a secure, reputable answering service or shared receptionist…Ruby Receptionists is a virtual receptionist/answering service used by many solos and small businesses” (p.110). She also offers several tips on call handling, such as making sure the person who answers says the firm’s name in the greeting and that keeping them in the loop about your availability will make your practice look good.
Solo by Choice is a fantastic, beneficial read for solos and anyone thinking about striking out on their own, and she touches on everything from starting a practice to marketing and social media to how to take a vacation (a real one!). We’re delighted to be mentioned in such a comprehensive guide! If your interest is piqued and you’d like to pick up a copy, you can order one here.
Happy New Year from all of us at Ruby®! Our virtual receptionist service will be closed on Monday, January 2nd in observance of the holiday, and all calls will be answered according to your afterhours call handling. Our cheerful virtual receptionists will resume answering calls live Tuesday, January 3rd.
Cheers to a happy and successful 2012!
Best wishes,
We’re thrilled that we’ve made Oregon Business magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon” for 2102! Since one of our Core Values is Fostering Happiness and the ranking is dependent on employee surveys, this is a particularly meaningful award for us.
This is our third year to have made the list, and last year we were overjoyed to be named the #2 “Best Company to Work For” in the medium-sized business category. In fact, almost forty Rubys attended, and we gave a raucous roar when our name was announced; our virtual receptionists may have soft, friendly voices when answering phones but we also know how to cheer with the best of them!
We were also named #1 in Performance Management, #2 in Career Development and Training, and #3 in Benefits and Compensation among medium-sized businesses. Our Star Service & Receptionist Cultivators are extremely committed to their receptionist teams (appropriately named the “Riveting,” “Radiant,” and most recently the “Gems”), and it felt great to recognize all their hard work.
Feel free to check out our Facebook album for pictures from last year’s awards dinner. We can’t wait to attend Oregon Business’s annual event in March and find out where we rank for 2012!
Your virtual receptionist team wishes you all the best this holiday season! Ruby® will be closed on Monday, December 26th in observence of Christmas, and calls will be answered according to your afterhours instructions. We’ll be back bright and early answering your calls live at 5:00am Pacific on Tuesday, December 27th, so that you can enjoy a little more yuletide relaxation!
Warmest wishes,
Here are a few photos from the festivities:
Ruby's pink tree with a bounty of gifts!
A few months ago, our Client Services Director, Ashley Hampton, started a Ruby book club. In the spirit of Innovation and Practicing WOWism, each month we read a new business book about delighting customers, team-building, and other inspiring topics. It’s a great way for us to come together, have some fun, and invigorate the team with new ideas.
Recently, award-winning speaker and CEO of Contagious Companies, Monica Wofford spoke at our staff meeting and energized our virtual receptionist team. We thought her book Contagious Leadership would be perfect for the Ruby book club and indeed it sparked some spirited discussion! We were especially intrigued by her point that different people are motivated by different things (recognition, monetary rewards, etc.), and we will definitely be thinking more about this when we design our quarterly incentive campaigns!
The Ruby Book Club discussing Contagious Leadership