After establishing contact with the associates you’re trying to reach, you should be ready to use the time as effectively as if you were in a face-to-face meeting.

■Tolerant Neighbors

When using the telephone at work, don’t forget about the people around you who aren’t involved in the conversation. If you can, close your office door or warn your cubicle neighbors before making speaker phone calls, as a person’s speaking voice inclines to increase in volume when using remote technology.

■Headset Etiquette

In many offices, people whose job involves quite a number of telephone works use a special hands-free headset-type telephone, which frees these workers to walk around the office with the ergonomically friendly device.

If you use this type of telephone, remember not to bring your conversations into parts of the office where they do not belong. Many office workers may relate stories of coworkers walking up and down the offices seeming to talk to themselves. Be attentive to the acoustics of the area in which you are conducting business, and to your coworkers’ work space.

If you work with people who use hands-free telephones, develop a way of ascertaining quickly whether they are on a call before initiating a conversation with them.

■When to Say No

If you have a meeting in your office and you don’t want to interrupt, learn how to use the “do not disturb” function on your phone, or lower the ringer. A ringing telephone can cause quite a disturbance in a sensitive meeting. Also, if you want to focus on a particular project—say you’ve got a deadline and you’re not expecting any important calls—you can disable your phone so that your calls go straight to voice-mail.

However, don’t hide behind your voice-mail. Nowadays, technology makes it quite feasible to keep people at bay indefinitely. But if people identify you are trying to avoid answering your phone, they will stop calling, which could adversely affect business relationships.

■Have a Nice Day

At the end of each call, thank your caller or the person you called for his/her time, and ring off with a pleasant goodbye.