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Last week, I asked my mom how my brother was doing since I hadn’t talked to him since Christmas.  Her response was not exactly what I was expecting; she said he’s just trying not to get the flu.  Considering getting sick is not something he would usually worry about, I figured it must really be bad in his city.  He couldn’t get a flu shot because there were none left and he was working from home.  Apparently everyone at the shared work space his company uses was sick. 

Unfortunately, we don’t all have the luxury to work from home when others show up to work sick.  Companies may or may not offer paid sick leave and the issue of going to work sick can affect the entire company.  In a shared work space, going to work sick can affect not just your company but many others. Certain industries will have contact with many different people throughout the work day. Rather than debate mandatory paid sick leave I wanted to offer a few suggestions to keep your employees healthy:

1. Buy a couple of bottles of hand sanitizer and place them throughout your building. It’s a cheap way to encourage employees to wash their hands more. For those who have work trucks, give them a bottle to keep on their trucks. They might be in and out of customers’ houses then come back to the garage with germs from the kid who was home sick.
2. Keep Emergen-C packets in the lunch room or near water coolers.
3. If it’s possible, let people work from home if your company gets hit hard. Or be okay with virtual meetings between different offices to ease sharing germs.
4. Offer ways to help reduce employee stress since immune responses are slowed by stress.

These are just a couple easy ideas to keep your workforce healthy.  Are you doing anything else?

Erica L.

Originally posted at http://uecubenefit.uecu.org/