The winter can be a hard time for staffing at small businesses. It’s not just the holidays that thin employee ranks, it’s also colds and the flu. Owners can cope by making it easier for staffers to telecommute and by having a pool of workers who can fill in.
In short, planning ahead will make it far easier for a small company to get through a spate of employee absences.
“You always have to have a contingency plan,” said Jeff Evans, general manager of Lake Naomi Club, a country club community in Pocono Pines, Pa. “People are going to come to the facility regardless of the fact that a lot of people have been hit with the flu.”
“One of the things we do is a lot of cross-training,” allowing employees to sub for one another, Evans said. And that can happen even if an employee manages to come in to work — for example, when a waiter is sneezing and coughing and can’t work in the restaurant. In that case, he or she might work in the office while someone else waits tables.
“We’ve been very lucky with having a group of people that understands the team concept and understands that if they’re not here, that hurts the entire team,” Evans said.
Evans also has a pool of temporary workers to draw from, including employees’ relatives and friends. During the holiday season, he can also get workers from companies that have some down time.
The key, though, is knowing in advance where to turn for help. Starting your search for substitutes when you get a phone call from a sneezing, hacking employee means you may well end up with an unfilled shift and work that goes undone.
Joyce Gioia-Herman, a management consultant who until a few years ago had employees of her own, suggests a pool of subs that includes former employees, retirees and full-time moms who want to work every now and then. Depending on your line of work, you may also want to sign on with a temporary staffing agency.
If that isn’t an option, Gioia-Herman, president of The Herman Group in Greensboro, N.C., suggests a little triage — determine which projects and customers are the highest priority, and which ones might be put aside with few or no negative consequences.
“See what can be left by the wayside if you have to,” she said.
Gioia-Herman noted that when several staffers are out at the same time, there’s likely to be a higher stress level as everyone else pitches in and tries to keep up.
“Make sure that you allow for that and maybe bring in an extra lunch or look at how you can make things a little easier for those who are left,” she said.
Of course, many people come to work with mild colds, or are still having symptoms when they return. Consider stocking up on tissues, cough drops, aspirin and other items from the drug store, and also provide tea, honey and lemon. It will be physically soothing for people who come in to work not feeling well, and go a long way toward helping morale.
Another critical element in being prepared for employee absences, particularly those who work in an office, is using technology to allow them to stay in touch and to do as much work as they feel comfortable doing.
Ann Gallery, president of High View Communications, a Toronto-based public relations firm, was coughing and sneezing as she described how she uses a hand-held computer to do her work when she’s too sick to go into work.
“People don’t know where I am and what state I’m in,” she said, adding that high-tech devices “let me be sick.”
Gallery gets her e-mail through her hand-held, and also has her office calls diverted to her cell phone. “It’s my virtual office,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said of herself and her staff, “we all have wireless access, so everyone can log on to the system through the Internet” through their home PCs.
But again, this kind of capability needs to be set up in advance. If you don’t have a secure way for employees to log into your network from home, when one calls in sick tomorrow, chances are he or she won’t be able to do much work from home.
The kind of contingency planning you’d do to mitigate the effects of colds and the flu is the same you’d undertake as part of a disaster preparation plan, or as Gallery pointed out, as part of planning to cover vacations. In all these scenarios, you need to know who’s going to get the work done, and, if they can’t do it on your premises, how they might do it remotely.
Joyce Rosenberg writes about small business issues for the Associated Press.
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