During flu season, keeping your employees healthy isn’t just a moral duty— it’s also good business! If your workers are frequently too sick to work, it disrupts your business, making it harder to stay productive. A reputation for sickness can also turn off customers, who don’t want to patronize your business if they think they’ll get the flu there. It is thus essential to protect your employees from the flu virus and other contagious diseases to the best of your ability. The following tips will help you do just that, creating a workplace that is safe and healthy for employees and customers alike:
1. Accentuate Awareness
The single most important strategy for avoiding the flu is to simply be aware of how serious it is and how it can spread. You should thus take time at company meetings or other events to educate employees on the flu, pointing out:
- Its Severity– Employees must understand that the flu is a highly serious, and in some cases deadly, disease. By cutting corners on flu prevention, workers put themselves and their coworkers at risk. The better they understand that, the more they’ll invest themselves in flu prevention.
- Its Symptoms– Teach your workers how to tell the difference between the flu and other, more mundane diseases. This way, they will know if they have it from an early stage, allowing them to avoid others and recover more quickly.
- Its Sources– Inform your staff of all the places where the flu virus and other infectious diseases tend to gather and spread, including door handles, coffee pots, and the buttons and screens of workplace equipment. Employees should know not to touch their eyes, noses, or mouths after handling these items, and to frequently wash or sanitize their hands.
Giving employees this information empowers them to fight the flu. You can then further this empowerment when you:
2. Equip Your Employees
In addition to informing your staff of the seriousness of the flu and how best to avoid it, you also need to give them the resources to do so. By placing tissue boxes and alcohol-based hand sanitizer around the office, you make it easier for employees to protect themselves from germs and keep their risk of getting sick to a minimum. For even better results, consider paying for health professionals to come to your office and administer flu shots. The expense is well worth it, as you’ll be improving employee productivity for the entire season.
3. Offer Days Off
If despite all these efforts an employee does get the flu, the best thing they can do is stay home until they have recovered fully. Consider offering extra sick days during flu season and encouraging workers to take advantage of them. As with paying for flu shots, the benefits of this offer will far outweigh the cost. Letting one or two employees stay home is far less expensive than having them spread the flu to all their coworkers, potentially shutting down the entire office.
For more information on flu prevention, sanitation, and other steps to build a healthy workplace, contact F.A.S.T today.