Tagged with: Core Values

If the Shoe Fits: There’s No Place Like Ruby

By | 04.12.2012 |
Ruby Slippers

Photo by Chris Evans

Ruby is a family. That, more than anything, is something that makes my day-to-day job so fulfilling. I have worked at Ruby Receptionists as a virtual receptionist for nearly four years and take pride in how far the company has come while still maintaining a close-knit, caring sense of community.

Jill Nelson, our CEO, envisioned “Ruby” not only as our mascot, but also as the representation of our Core Values in action. When I first joined the Ruby team, Jill was a leader who knew me by name and always had a word of support.

For some companies this would be the part of the story where a “but” might be in order. “But, then what happens? Ruby has grown! Surely such a fast-growing company has lost its sense of intimacy?”

Not really.

As one of Ruby’s “Receptionist Ambassadors,” I have had the ear of Jill and the Leadership Team on a regular basis. Each month, I and a fellow virtual receptionist, hold an open meeting where we discuss the concerns and needs of our receptionist staff and create an open dialog about innovation and employee fulfillment. We brainstorm professional development opportunities and green-lighted office-space enhancements (like cable in the break room… because Mad Men’s back on!).

The Ruby Ambassadors change every quarter, but thanks to those discussions, I had the opportunity to meet with Kevin, our Marketing Director, to discuss professional development and learn more about the sales and marketing teams at Ruby. We were to have a lunch meeting, but time was short. Fifteen minutes into our meeting, I began to worry I had crashed his lunch hour. Just then, a knock at the door announced Jill, bustling in with sandwiches and a cheerful insistence that she would be back with plates and napkins in a minute.

Cue record scratch: My CEO is bringing me lunch?!?!

Ruby is a company that excels in seeing the visionary capacity of its employees, top to bottom. Ideas, no matter how large or small, are encouraged and nurtured. This is what makes Ruby an exceptional company. This is what makes me feel like family.

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Ruby Launches a Paid Sabbatical Program for Our Virtual Receptionists!

By | 02.01.2012 |
Ruby Receptionists at the 2011 "Best Companies to Work For" event

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!

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Training for WOWism: Focus on Basics First, Then on Outcomes

By | 01.12.2012 |
Holly and virtual receptionist Jenny

Staff Cultivator Holly and receptionist Jenny S. going through the Ruby training guidebook!

The virtual receptionist training program at Ruby® is ever-changing and ever-improving. However, one thing that stays the same is our goal to equip our phone answering team with the tools they need to field calls efficiently while putting smiles on callers’ faces. And it all starts on the first day of training. As Joseph A. Michelli outlines in The New Gold Standard, focusing on outcomes rather than idividual tasks can create memorable moments of customer service, and we’ve taken that philosophy to heart.

In line with our Ruby Hierarchy of Service Pyramid, Ruby training begins with basics. In initial training, our virtual receptionists gain the skills they’ll need to thrive as members of the Ruby team. We show them how to use our unique software: what button answers a call; where to find the client’s custom greeting; what to say when introducing the call; and how to transfer it to the client, take a message, or transfer it to voicemail. We also introduce our Core Values right from the start, because once a groundwork of basic skills has been established, we come back to them to work our way up the pyramid. Trainees then focus on the outcomes of fostering happiness, creating experiences (showing how tone and phrasing can make even the briefest exchange an uplifting one), fulfilling unexpressed needs, and making meaningful connections.

Achieving these outcomes is all part of what we call  ”practicing WOWism.” (It’s so important to us that Practice WOWism is one of our Core Values!) Our concept of WOWism was captured perfectly in a recent post: “The WOWism that we hold so dear is really a commitment to listening, always looking for ways to help without being asked, and most importantly, making a personal connection.” When we hear a “Wow!” from a caller, we know it’s working!

How do you train your employees to inspire excellent customer service? We’d love to hear from you in our comment section below!

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Ruby Takes #2 Spot at the “100 Best Companies to Work For” Awards!

By | 03.04.2011 |

“You want to know how to get a crowd going? Say one word: Ruby.” 

That’s how Oregon Business Editor in Chief, Robin Doussard, kicked off her presentation last night night amidst cheers… and this was even before we learned where we ranked! The whole group from Ruby® Receptionists was absolutely thrilled when they announced that Ruby is the #2 medium-sized “Best Company to Work For in Oregon!” 

Almost forty of Ruby’s virtual receptionists and support staff attended Oregon Business magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For in Oregon” event last night, and I’m sure we made quite an impression. We brought our usual Ruby enthusiasm to the whole night: enjoying our coworkers’ company after a break from answering phones, making new friends with the other nominees, and listening to some wonderful speeches, including inspiring remarks from local grocery chain New Seasons Market’s President Lisa Sedlar.

In 2010 we earned the #19 spot in the Small Companies division of the list and were extremely happy to have made it on the list on our first try. After experiencing some phenomenal growth over the last few years, we were excited to take the plunge in the Medium Companies category (described as 35-99 employees). Aside from being ranked second among other medium-sized businesses, we were proud to learn that this year we also ranked #1 in Performance Management, #2 in Career Development and Training, and #3 in Benefits and Compensation in the medium category. This is definitely a tribute to the hard work our Receptionist Services department does every day; checking in personally with each virtual receptionist and providing on-going training through “Ruby University.”

What makes the “100 Best Companies to Work For” award particularly meaningful to us, is that it’s based on survey responses from our staff. We were especially touched to see the video interviews from Staff Manager Ang Gray and virtual receptionist Sara-Lee. Check out their thoughts as well as those of employees from a number of other top companies on what makes a great place to work:

We’d also like to give some shout outs to a few of our fellow “Best”-ers: Congrats EO friends Michael Leland of Mortgage Trust and Jim Smith at McKenzie Books! Both nabbed spots on the list, and it was great to have the opportunity to spend a little more time with them. Congratulations as well to Emerick Construction for making the list! It was great to meet you! And who could forget Stumptown Coffee Roasters? We’ve been asked a few times what is in the water up here in Portland to make us so darn friendly, and, you guessed it, a couple caraffes of piping hot Stumptown at the ready definitely keeps us smilin’!

Thanks again to everyone who makes Ruby such a great place to work, and congratulations to everyone who made the list!

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Create Office Community With a SharePoint Social Site

By | 01.27.2011 |

Does your company use Microsoft SharePoint? We do! What is SharePoint? Well, it’s a lot of things: it’s a program that makes web page building a snap for folks familiar with Microsoft products, it’s a great way to share documents and information, it’s a social networking site, it’s an amazing way to communicate, and the list goes on and on.

This fantastic interactive tool replaced our office intranet years ago, and we couldn’t be happier. I’m no SharePoint expert, so I’ll leave the how-to explanations to the pros (a quick Internet search of “SharePoint” yields tons of great results!), but in this post, I’ll give you a snapshot of one of the many ways we use SharePoint. And trust me, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Creating Community is one of the Ruby Receptionist Core Values, and we use SharePoint to help us do just that. As you can probably guess, all our phone answering keeps us pretty busy. Because we don’t always have time to chat face-to-face, our Director of Culture Sarah Sackett created a social website on SharePoint. It’s sub-site of our main SharePoint page, and it’s dedicated strictly to fun stuff. Here are three cool things our social site allows us to do:

1. Share photos. We love to host events and snap photos of the Ruby revelry. The SharePoint picture library feature makes sharing photos a breeze! The best part? All it takes is a minute of photo viewing to put smiles on our faces. Ah, memories!

2. Share recommendations. Looking for a good restaurant, a new doctor, or something fun to do this weekend? Never fear, the social site is here! We’ve got discussion boards for all sorts of intriguing topics. When we want feedback, we know where to turn!

3. Know what’s up. Our Event Planning Committee creates all sorts of opportunities for our teambuilding — kickball, bowling, and volunteering, to name a few. So when does all this fun stuff go down? Just check the event calendar on the social site to find out!

If your team uses SharePoint, consider creating a space for socialization. We think you’ll like the results! And if you already use SharePoint for a social site, please share your tips below.

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Ruby Receptionists: Making Our Mark by Practicing WOWism

By | 11.23.2010 |

Practicing Wowism

I know y’all have been waiting with bated breath for this fourth and final installment of our Core Values in Action series. Our Core Values define who we are and what we believe; these are the values that drive us. So far we’ve talked about Innovation, Creating Community, and Fostering Happiness. When all three of those values come together and maybe with a little bit of Ruby magic, you get something really good. Something so good we had to invent a word for it: WOWism.

There are a lot of times when we could sit back on our heels and wash our hands of a situation. Phone trouble? Talk to your phone company. Stuck in traffic and need to tell a client you’re late? Call him yourself. Left your cell phone at home? Guess you don’t have anyone’s contact information today! But that’s not Ruby. We’ll help you talk to your phone company, our live virtual receptionists will make outbound calls for you, and we can help dig up old messages. And if we can think of anything else that might be helpful, well then, we’ll do that, too!

Our Client Services Department is a big part of Practicing WOWism. Their top priority is making sure we answer calls in a way that works for the client. If our “default settings,” as it were, aren’t exactly what you need, no worries! We’ll keep working with you to find what works best for your company and your callers.

In fact, Missy Malone, a current Ruby client who owns a mobile spa service, Spataneity, said just the other day that, “Ruby® Receptionists goes above and beyond anything more than I could ever ask for in customer service…You Rock!!” And not to toot our own horn, but we frequently get these kinds of responses; people are amazed — WOWed even! — at what we’ll do to make our clients, callers, and fellow virtual receptionists‘ lives easier.

We’re not just about answering phones. We’re about making your day. We don’t do fine — we hit it out of the park. We’re about finding that special something that will knock your socks off, and giving it to you before you even know you want it. Nothing gives us a bigger kick than impressing our clients and team members. More than impressing, really — surprising, delighting, WOWing. Simply doing a good job isn’t enough for us. We make our mark by practicing WOWism.

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Business Tip: How to Run a Successful Incentive Campaign

By | 11.16.2010 |

Incentive campaign

Ok, so you’ve done all your prep work. You know what you want to do, you have a plan… now how do you make it happen? After running several energizing campaigns for Ruby® Receptionists’ live phone answering crew, I’m excited to share four more tips about the nuts ‘n’ bolts of running an inspiring campaign!

Timing is everything. During your busy season, it might not be in your best interest to launch a participation-based campaign when your staff will be focusing elsewhere. However, incentive campaigns are a fabulous tool to add some pick-me-up to a slow season or a dreary winter month!

Make it fun! Incentive campaigns should shake up the ol’ humdrum routine and make people feel appreciated and part of team effort. Competition can be a valuable motivator for some people, but it can also tear a team apart, so it’s important to find a balance.

Promote. I like to launch our incentive campaigns at our quarterly staff meetings because it gives me a chance to get our virtual receptionists jazzed about it right off the bat. After you launch, be sure the keep up the cheerleading! Use everything you’ve got — emails, company newsletters, a bulletin board, flyers in the office, intranet sites, and so on to promote and create excitement.

Find your influencers and get them involved. Leading by example works. Getting your company’s senior members and managers on board is definitely important, but employees look up to more people than just their boss. Regardless of their title, if you can find those influencers and put a bit of extra focus on getting them engaged, I think you will be surprised with how well that will motivate your team as a whole.

You’ve heard what I do for our team of live virtual receptionists; are there other tricks that you use to keep employees happy and motivated? Post your tip below!

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Small Business Tip: How to Plan an Inspiring Incentive Campaign

By | 11.04.2010 |
Incentive campaigns keep our virtual receptionists sharp

Photo by Steven Depolo

Oh, the incentive campaign. The mere mention of an incentive campaign, and you’ll either be a kid in a candy store, or you’ll be shakin’ in your boots. I myself get giddy just thinking about the potential. Incentive campaigns are one of our favorite motivators here at Ruby® Receptionists; our team of virtual receptionists are top-notch because we support them in developing their phone answering skills while fostering a little happiness in the process.

Think you can’t host an incentive campaign because of the size of your company or your limited budget? A little goes a long way! Here are four tips on getting started:

Set clear goals. What are you hoping to achieve with your incentive campaign? Are you trying to increase your numbers, move a certain product, build teamwork, improve a particular skill set? Let that be your starting point to build the game.

Know your team. Don’t just make some generic campaign — really think about your audience and who will be participating. What motivates them? Think carefully about the tasks as well as the reward; it will make them feel invested and the participation level will be much greater.

Pick the right reward. It’s true that we all love a monetary reward, but cash is not the only motivator. For example, because our virtual receptionists are female and quite a few of them are novice chefs, kitchen gadgets — and prizes such as manicures and spa days — are always favorites at Ruby. Consider what you want to achieve when you set prizes as well — would a group prize (like a pizza party or a new fun toy for the break room) or an individual prize be more fitting to your campaign?

Build a budget. Incentive campaigns do not have to be expensive. No, really — they don’t! Small tokens of thoughtful appreciation are so important to morale; just focus on the little things that make people’s days better. Small prizes like a long lunch, ice cream parties, gift cards, etc. can be really well-received if you present them thoughtfully.

I’ve already shared a few of our campaigns – like Random Acts of Happiness and Rubies for Rubys. What are favorite campaigns that you’ve hosted or been involved in?

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Three Things to Do on Your Employee’s First Day

By | 10.28.2010 |
Amy T., our newest live virtual receptionist on her very first day!

Our newest virtual receptionist, Amy T., on her very first day!

 

I’m proud to say that first days are pretty awesome at Ruby® Receptionists. Our HR, Culture, and Receptionist Services departments work together to support every new live virtual receptionist we hire, and the systems they’ve created ensure fantastic first days. Whether your office is big or small, making a great impression is important on day one. First days are also a crucial time to show that your team is organized, on the ball, and gets things done — and that the same is expected from any new addition. The following three basics are a must when we welcome a new employee to our telephone answering team, and we think they’ll work wonders for your team, too: 

1. Be extra early. If you’re showing a new employee the ropes, be at work well before your newbie is set to arrive. Any eager new employee will show up early — sometimes even very early — so give yourself plenty of time to get settled and prepare for the day. If you’re at all concerned about your ability to get to work early, create a contingency plan with a co-worker so that your new teammate gets a graceful greeting — even if traffic is terrible for you that particular morning. 

2. Emphasize your company’s core values. If your company is anything like our team of virtual receptionists, core values are guideposts for every work-related decision, big or small. Training can be overwhelming for both a trainer and a new employee — no matter what a position entails, there’s always a lot to learn and a lot to teach. Your newbie will forget some details, and will need help after initial training is complete, but teaching a new employee the importance of your core values on day one sets that employee up for success. When new team members let core values guide them, they’re likely to make quality decisions even before grasping all the ins and outs of a new job. 

3. Work! Don’t make day one a “coast day” for your new employee. Prepare work for your newbie to do, even if it’s super basic. A first day is all about setting the tone for your new teammate, and it’s important to show your company’s dedication to work ethic from the get-go. Fun stuff is important, too — make time for introductions and an office tour, and maybe take your new employee out to lunch and give a tour of neighborhood. But once settled, give your new team member the opportunity to accomplish a bit of work. 

Now that you’ve heard how we prepare for each new virtual receptionist, what first-day routines does your team stand by? We’d love to hear them!

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The Importance of Fostering Happiness

By | 10.26.2010 |
Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener came to speak to Ruby Receptionists' live virtual receptionists

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener

Earlier this month, our leadership team — including founder/CEO Jill Nelson, our staff managers, and department heads — went to a special strength-based training workshop led by Positive Psychology expert Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener. He literally travels the globe a là Indiana Jones, studying happiness (no really, that’s his job!). During this training session, our staff was so impressed with Dr. Robert’s philosophy that we asked him to return to Ruby to conduct a presentation for our team of bright, friendly virtual receptionists. What Dr. Robert told us was truly inspiring. Basically, there is empirical evidence that happy people:

• are less likely to contract colds
• are more likely to volunteer
• make more money
• get better customer and supervisor evaluations  
• smoke and use alcohol less
• get arrested less often
• get in fewer car accidents
• take fewer ambulance rides and have fewer emergency visits
• show up to work on time more
• are more likely to help a colleague
• have better safety records at work
• and live longer!

Seriously. Happiness doesn’t just feel good, it is good.

When I was hired at Ruby and learned that Fostering Happiness was one of the Core Values, I knew it was pretty special. What other answering service can say the same? What other company, for that matter? But when Dr. Robert shared this incredible list, and I considered what powerful effects can come from actively promoting happiness, it blew my mind. So, let’s keep this going, folks! Our virtual receptionists will keep working hard at fostering a little happiness with every call they take, and I hope maybe you’ll be inspired as well.  

Special thanks to Dr. Robert for talking to us about what a big impact a little joy can make. For more information on positive psychology and helpful tips on how to use your strengths to lead a happier life, check out Dr. Robert’s website: Intentional Happiness.

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