Frank’s Employment

The H1N1 virus (also known as the “swine flu”) complicates the influenza season for all of us, since very few of us have developed any immunity to it.  The staff of Frank’s Employment has strategized together how to approach the seasonal flu and H1N1 flu virus risks this year with respect to our in-house staff, our candidates, and our client companies.

Here are some of the proactive ways we are protecting our own health - and yours, in turn.

Prevention is the first level of our approach, including common best practices for infection control.

1. All of the staffmembers who regularly have contact with clients and candidates in person have already received a seasonal flu vaccination this fall.  None of us qualifies for high-risk priority access to the H1N1 vaccine.  So we will defer this unless additional dosages become available to the general public.
2. We are each doing our best to strengthen our immune systems: eating healthy meals; drinking plenty of water; getting sufficient rest.  And the laughter that frequently resonates through our offices helps with endorphins, of course!
3. We cover our coughs and sneezes (especially important for airborne agents such as influenza); we routinely wash our hands throughout the business day (important for colds and other contagions).
4. In addition, we have hand sanitizers available at several stations throughout our space.  Applicants and other visitors are also welcome to use these.
5. We are more frequently cleaning our phones, keyboards, and other shared office equipment, especially since these items are touched by different hands throughout the day.  We are more frequently emptying our wastebaskets as well.

Basic response preparedness is the second level of our plan.  Even with general preventive measures in place, it’s certainly possible that one of us could “catch” the flu.

1. Anyone on our staff who is running a fever of 100 degrees or higher will stay home.
2. That person will not return to the office until the fever has fully subsided for at least 24 hours.
3. We have recognized that notifying our whole staff will be helpful in regrouping when someone is ill.  The staffperson who is ill will notify our President; then he will also notify the rest of the staff so that we have even a few extra minutes before arriving at the office to think through what next steps will be our responsibility.  One person is responsible for checking that staffmember’s email and voicemail.  Another person is responsible for disinfecting the desk and other equipment (as a basic infection control procedure), for example.
4. We have remote access to our daily calendars with details such as the names of the applicants who are coming in to interview, test, and/or train.  We have added the applicant phone numbers to those records so that individuals can be called earlier if appointments need to be rescheduled.
5. We also have remote access to our voicemail and to call-forwarding features.  For the individual who is ill, this will make it possible to change the voicemail announcement to indicate that he/she is out of the office.  If the staffmember later feels strong enough to take calls before the contagion period has ended, then he/she will be able to forward calls to a home phone.
6. Since we work as a collaborative team, we routinely “brief” one another as to our current searches and projects.  This sharing of information is all the more important for the flu season, enabling us to handle each other’s desks and duties in the event that one of us is out for an extended period.
7. We also have processes in place to respond to what may be an increasing level of last-minute temporary staffing needs from our clients, perhaps having higher numbers of workers who need to stay home.

Basic prevention and response is not only important internally for our staff, but also externally for our applicants and temporaries who may be interviewing and working at the sites of our client companies.  So we have published and conveyed to our candidates similar recommendations.  We have stressed how important it is for them to protect their own health as a way of indirectly protecting the health of employees for our clients.  Following the CDC guidelines, we have asked that our applicants and/or temporaries running a fever of 100 degrees or higher stay home and notify us, which gives us an opportunity to cancel their interview or reassign a new temporary.

Extreme response is the third level of our plan.  We hope that this will not be needed!  If there is an severely adverse situation (such as 90% of our staff sick and 10% of our staff at offsite meetings), we have additional procedures planned.  For example, if our office hours need to be reduced, we’ll announce that on our general voicemail system, as well as here on our staff blog and other social media sites.

Our approach to these preventive and responsive measures is one that we continue to re-evaluate as new information becomes available from the CDC.  We hope that you will join us in taking reasonable steps for the health of your workers and your workplace.