£22bn bill for lost phone calls at work

MISSED phone calls are costing British business a staggering £22 billion a year, according to new research.

An online survey of 30,000 office workers found that staff waste half an hour a day on average leaving messages or picking up colleagues' calls.

Most workers in the survey said they get through to the people they want to speak to only 60% of the time.

This was because they were in meetings, out of the office or on the phone to someone else.

With 14 million office workers being paid an average of between £10.50 and £12.88 an hour, the cost of missed calls - known as telephone tag - totals £83 million a day.

Companies such as Siemens, the German technology giant which commissioned the research, and Microsoft see a huge opportunity as business battles to cut costs and become more efficient.

Siemens has just introduced a new office technology system called Openscape. This uses broadband technology to link phones and computers to indicate where an office worker is - at their desk, on the phone or in a meeting.

Paul Mould, Siemens marketing director, said: 'The aim is to make the engaged tone a thing of the past and speed up workers' access to the information and people they need.'

Microsoft's Messenger software already pinpoints when someone else using the software is on the internet so that another person using the same system can instantly communicate with them. The Siemens variant, which runs on the new Microsoft Office system, places a traffic light icon next to a person's name on a computer screen to reveal their whereabouts - green being the signal to contact them.