How do I cover the business phone properly while a staff member is on leave?

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Staff leave is predictable, everyone takes time off eventually, but phone coverage for it often isn't planned until the day it's needed, if it's planned at all. The person who normally answers a specific line or handles a specific set of calls is simply gone for a week, and unless someone deliberately redirects their calls, those calls just go unanswered the whole time, with the customer having no idea why.

Calilio is one phone system that offers call forwarding as a built-in feature for exactly this, redirecting a specific line to a cover colleague for a set period. Plain carrier forwarding to your own mobile is the free version of the same idea and may already be enough for a small team. I'm using Calilio's version here as a concrete example of how the feature actually works.

Why ad-hoc coverage fails

The informal version of this, "just let people know Sarah's calls should go to Tom this week," relies entirely on every caller somehow knowing to call Tom instead, which almost never happens for anyone who already has Sarah's direct number saved. The calls still arrive at Sarah's line, they just go unanswered because nobody actually changed where that line routes to. The fix has to happen at the phone system level, not as a verbal instruction to callers who have no way to receive it. A better long-term setup is one phone number that reaches whoever is working.

Setting up temporary coverage properly

Call forwarding, confirmed as included on Calilio's Standard plan, lets you redirect a specific line to another number, in this case a cover colleague's mobile, for a defined period rather than permanently. The key word is temporary: this isn't the same as merging two people's calls together long-term, it's a time-boxed redirect that should have a clear start and end date tied to the actual leave dates.

Step by step: covering a colleague's leave

1. Pick a cover person who actually has the context to handle the calls, not just whoever's available. If Sarah's calls involve ongoing client relationships, the cover person needs at least a basic handoff on what's in progress.
2. Set forwarding for the exact leave dates, not an open-ended "until further notice" that's easy to forget about. Knowing the end date up front makes the next step (turning it off) much less likely to get missed.
3. Update the greeting if the line has one, so callers who reach voicemail or an automated message know they've reached the right business even though a different person answers if the call connects.
4. Test a call before the leave actually starts, to confirm forwarding is active and working, rather than discovering a misconfiguration on the colleague's actual first day off.
5. Turn it off when the person is back. This is the step that actually gets forgotten, and the consequence is calls meant for the returning employee continuing to ring a colleague's phone indefinitely, creating exactly the kind of confusion this setup was meant to prevent.

Call forwarding sits on Calilio's Standard plan, $15 a month per user or $12 a month billed annually, the same tier as ring strategies, call queue and number sharing.

A worked example: covering a sole account manager's leave

A service business where one account manager owns most of the relationship with a handful of key clients has a sharper version of this problem than a general support line does: the calls that go unanswered during their leave aren't random inquiries, they're specific clients who expect a specific person and may read unfamiliar coverage as a downgrade in service. The fix here needs an extra step beyond simple forwarding: a short handoff note for the cover person on each key client's current status, open items, anything mid-conversation, so the cover person sounds genuinely informed rather than like a stranger picking up a stranger's phone. Forwarding the calls solves reachability; the handoff note solves whether the call actually goes well once it connects.

Worth deciding in advance rather than improvising mid-call: whether the cover person should attempt to handle the client's need directly, or simply take a message and confirm the account manager will follow up once back. For anything beyond a routine question, defaulting to "I'll make sure this gets handled the moment they're back, in the meantime here's what I can help with now" is usually safer than a cover person guessing at account history they don't fully have. Handing a caller on smoothly is covered in transferring a call to a colleague without making the caller wait.

What I'd actually tell you

Build this into your leave-request process itself, rather than treating it as a separate task someone remembers (or doesn't) once leave is already approved. The moment leave is confirmed, phone coverage should be one of the standard things that gets arranged alongside workload handoff, the same way you'd already be planning who covers a specific client or project. Treating it as an afterthought is exactly how calls end up genuinely unanswered for the first day or two of someone's leave before anyone notices.

For a team that frequently has someone out, even informally staggered time off across a small group, setting up a recurring cover rotation in Calilio rather than configuring forwarding fresh every single time saves real setup effort across the year.

A practical note on overlapping leave periods

Coverage gets genuinely harder the moment two people are out at the same time, which happens more often than most small teams plan for around holidays and school breaks. A single cover person absorbing one colleague's calls is manageable; absorbing two people's calls on top of their own regular workload often means something quietly gets dropped, not because the forwarding failed, but because one person simply can't give full attention to three roles' worth of calls at once. Before approving overlapping leave for people who normally cover for each other, check who's actually left to answer the phone during that specific window, and if the honest answer is "nobody with real capacity," that's worth raising before the leave is finalized, not after calls start going unanswered. The related problem is covered in stopping missed calls when the one person who answers is busy.

Common mistakes with leave coverage

• Treating forwarding as optional for "quiet" roles. A role that seems low-call-volume on a normal day can still generate an urgent call during someone's one week off, and there's no way to predict which week that'll be.
• Not confirming the cover person actually knows they're covering. Setting up forwarding without a direct conversation means the cover person might be caught off guard by calls they didn't know to expect, which shows in how confidently they handle them.
• Leaving the handoff notes too vague to be useful. "Cover Sarah's calls" tells a colleague nothing about what's actually in progress. A specific, short list of open items is worth the ten minutes it takes to write.

When this might not be necessary

Free carrier call forwarding to your own mobile may already cover this adequately for a very small team where the "cover person" is effectively just you, forwarding your own direct line somewhere else temporarily. The value of doing it through Calilio specifically grows once you have a proper team structure where different people's calls need different, specific cover arrangements rather than everything funneling to one person by default. For recurring or complex coverage patterns across a bigger team, I build scheduling logic that handles this automatically rather than requiring manual setup for every leave request. If the person away is you, see getting office calls while you travel.