CorpComms Magazine

Civil servants who kept working during the recent strike were told to imitate recorded messages to cope with the deluge of calls they were receiving from the public.

Staff manning the phones at the Department for Work and Pensions in Carlisle were handed a short script and asked to deliver it in the style of an automated response and then hang up. The somewhat familiar message, issued in the busiest lunch period, between noon and 2pm, read: 'Due to the high volume of enquiries we are currently experiencing we are unable to take your call. Please call back later.'

The order was leaked onto Facebook through chats between strikers and colleagues not taking part in the industrial action. One employee confessed: 'To begin with, we all found it hard to keep a straight face, and occasionally, I slipped up and I ended up giving my name to the person who was calling.'

Unions estimate that more than 200,000 civil servants walked out during the March 8 strike leaving their departments in disarray. But employees were a little bewildered at the DWP strategy for handling the crisis 'We were asking why they didn't just prepare a proper answering message saying we couldn't answer calls because of the industrial action,' said one.

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