With all of the publicity surrounding outbreaks of the H1N1 virus around the country, it is a good time to evaluate your company’s plan should H1N1 (or any other infectious disease) infect your business.  According to the Mayo Clinic (www.mayoclinic.com), here are some of the measures that help prevent flu and limit its spread:

Things to Consider if You Begin Feeling Ill

Stay home if you’re sick. If you do have swine flu, you can give it to others starting about 24 hours before you develop symptoms and ending about seven days later. As a courtesy to others, do your best to stay out of the emergency room, doctor’s office or urgent-care center. You don’t want to risk infecting anyone else — particularly in a medical facility, where others receiving care may be especially vulnerable to the flu.

• Wash your hands thoroughly and frequently. Use soap and water, or if they’re unavailable, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Flu viruses can survive for two hours or longer on surfaces, such as doorknobs and countertops.
• Avoid contact. Stay away from crowds if possible.
• Reduce exposure within your household. If a member of your household has swine flu, designate one other household member to be responsible for the ill person’s close personal care.

If you are going to follow these recommended procedures, that means that rather than taking a single “sick” day, your employees really should stay away from the office for 7-10 days.  Most employees do not want to use all of their sick days at once, so they generally take some medication for the symptoms and come to work anyway.  The result, is that they infect fellow employees thereby compounding the problem.  Imagine if everyone in a particular department came down with the flu, or H1N1, or something else at the same time.  How would it impact your business to have them not in the office for a week to ten days?

Here is a quick checklist to see if you are prepared:

• Can your employees effectively work from home?
• How do they access their necessary systems, computer programs, email, etc?
• Are they accessible via the company phone system to take or make calls and access voicemail?
• Can they effectively complete their necessary tasks so as not to impact other parts of the business or your customers?

If you had to send everyone home to work for the next 2 weeks, could you still function normally (or at least effectively)?  If you cannot confidently answer “yes”, then you should consult with a managed service provider to discuss the necessary steps to developing a plan.  Supporting work-from-home employees is often a team approach which involves your IT infrastructure, phone systems, telecom routing, paper handling, and much more.  Rarely will you find all of those services from just one vendor, but with our specialists at managed service providers. Biz to offer you the necessary advice in each of the fields we can help you prepare for an H1N1 outbreak, or whatever else is next.  If you have not done so already, I would encourage you to start planning for the inevitable so that you can minimize the impact of sickness in your workplace.

By Jake Petersen