My colleague and good friend Jen Benz just wrote a blog on Benefits Buzz called, “Flu Prevention--Mostly Common Sense, but Do Your Benefits Policies Support It?” I'm suggesting it to all of you because it covers practical recommendations from the CDC that make this hard-to-imagine situation become more real.
The recommendations aren’t all that scary. In fact, it’s very much what you would expect when it comes to flu season.
With one exception.
A CDC guideline is “If sick, stay home for seven days after your symptoms begin or until you have been symptom-free for 24 hours, whichever is longer.” Stop. Pause. Reread to confirm. Stay home for (at least) seven days.
I can hear it now. Oh, that’s an exaggeration. A flu normally lasts three or four days. Well, I was recently at a conference where I met a (strapping, vital) businessman who went home to Australia, and when I checked in to say hello, he emailed me that he had been in bed for days with the Swine flu. When I checked again to see how he was recovering, he told me he felt weak and needed a few more days to get back up to speed.
Jen was reminding Benefits practitioners to be prepared to help employees with the confusing combo of company time off and regulatory leaves that would enable them to be paid for all that time away from work. And, of course, to begin to get the employee communications ready, if HR hadn’t started on them yet.
But that got me thinking. How would H1N1 affect the work of the rest of HR? What if we really did have large numbers of people sick for a week or longer? It might only take a couple of sneezes for whole departments to be unstaffed or understaffed for days at a time. (Not necessarily an overstatement!)
Picture functions like Call Centers, Accounts Receivable and Security with seriously depleted staffing. (Hmmm. We might be able to struggle through a shortage of Department Heads or Vice Presidents, though.) Surely HR would be asked to collaborate on solutions when customer service, cash flow or safety were compromised.
And that’s when job descriptions leapt to mind. They would be one of the resources you could use to figure out how to move people in from other departments or recruit fill-in temps to help staff functions that were struggling.
Those lowly documents come in handy at the weirdest times, don’t they?
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