HR asking me to fill a form with my personal details for the office's directory, but I don't want to share my cell phone number with coworkers

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I don't mind giving my personal information to the HR staff, but they want to publish my residential and cell phone number in the office directory.

I don't have a residential phone, and I am not interested in all my colleagues getting my cell phone number. How can I avoid giving out this information without creating problems for myself at work? How can I approach this with HR?

They say it's in case of emergency (if they need me to come into the office outside of regular hours), but the job I have has no valid "emergency" reason to be called (job-wise), ever.

Edit: We are talking about my private cell phone (not on contract), nothing was provided by the company since I do not need a cell phone for my job.
There are 2 other programmers who are "always" on-call. I'm not on that list (we democratically choose to be on that on-call list or not, two out of 15 chose to be and we don't need more).

manpreet 2 years ago

I agree, it seems unnecessary to publish your phone number in a directory like that. If they are very insistent that you provide a number, or it would be awkward not to do so (some people just don't 'get' the notion that not everyone wants their personal information public and will actually be offended if you balk at the idea), you might sign up for a Google Voice number and give them that. You can even set that up as voicemail if you want, and it will email any messages to you. Then if you leave the job, disable the number.