Employee contact list

If there’s an unexpected work-related situation and you need to contact employees at short notice outside working hours, it’s important to have their up-to-date contact details easily accessible.

Unexpected situations

If there’s a fire, flood, storm damage, power cut or similar incident at your workplace, you might need to contact all your employees out of hours to advise them not to come in, or to work from home or from different business premises. Alternatively, you might only need to contact one or two employees outside their normal working hours, for example if an employee has phoned in sick and you need to find someone to cover their shift at short notice. Although you can’t predict when these types of events will occur, you can ensure you’re adequately prepared if they do.

Employee contact list

Our Employee Contact List, which you can turn into a spreadsheet if you wish, is designed to ensure you have all the contact details you need in one place. It covers employees’ names, their personal and work mobile and landline numbers and their personal email addresses, as well as next of kin details. Before you create your list, ask employees to confirm their latest contact details to you (as what you have in their personnel files may already be outdated) and explain why you want this information and what purpose you intend to use it for. You can also refer them to your GDPR Privacy Notice for Staff. For larger businesses, consider creating separate lists for different departments or teams. Bear in mind when creating your contact list that the more methods of contact you have for an employee, the more likely you are to be able to get hold of them.

Updating exercise

Once you’ve created your list, you must then keep it updated. So, at least twice a year, ask employees to explicitly confirm that their individual contact details are still correct, or to provide their latest contact details if any of them aren’t. You should, however, only supply them with their own details when doing this; don’t circulate the full contact list to everyone. The information on the list is employees’ personal data, so their work colleagues don’t have a right to see it. The list should only be available to those who might need to use it, e.g. directors and line managers.

Business continuity management

Having a contact list is only the first stage of managing business continuity. You also need a process in place for contacting relevant employees in a timely manner. Many employers opt to have a cascading notification plan in place, under which they phone relevant line managers and then those managers contact their direct reports, normally by telephone but possibly by email, text message and/or instant messaging apps if phone contact is unsuccessful. They can then contact you to confirm all their reports have acknowledged the notification and the task has been completed. You might also want to set a deadline for everyone to be successfully contacted, e.g. two hours. Do try a test run of your plan once it’s in place.