Sick Days

Flu season is upon us and this year in particular, with the spread of H1N1 (aka "snoutbreak") and other potentially virulent pandemics, it is important that businesses be vigilant in protecting themselves from disease that will affect employee productivity, and consequently, revenues, profitability and the overall future of a doomed human race.

But it is also important to not foster an environment of panic about illness. What with underwear bombs, global warming, flash earthquakes and Simon leaving American Idol, we have enough to panic about. Mild alarm will suffice.

To that end, here are a few simple guidelines that can be implemented to ensure that your workforce will be protected from the effects of flu season. We strongly advise adopting these measures, because it's highly likely that you, your employees, their families and everyone they have ever kissed, shaken hands with, spoken to, or friended on Facebook are already infected.

Wash your hands. It has long been known that physical contact is the most efficient way to spread disease, and that our hands are the primary vehicles for transmission. The importance of frequent washing cannot be overemphasized. Wash hands thoroughly before and after using the bathroom, eating, handling or touching the floor, doorknobs, walls or ceiling, touching or otherwise interacting with other people, animals or inanimate objects, operating heavy machinery, sleeping, working or washing your hands. Use warm water, disinfecting soap and a weak solution of sulfuric acid, then dry thoroughly with coarse-grained sandpaper. If possible, place hands in autoclave before using.

Allow sick workers to stay home. No one benefits when ill employees come to work and spread their germs to the other workers on staff. If employees are sick, they should remain at home and not have to worry about losing their jobs. The best way to alleviate this worry is, when employees begin showing early symptoms of flu such as coughing or sneezing, terminate them immediately. Waiting for full-blown H1N1 only heightens ambiguity, and no one wants that.

Communicate with local health officials. Your local and state health officials often have established policies and practices to deal with a wide variety of medical emergencies. These agencies should be kept abreast of the latest changes in your employees' health with dynamic, real-time communications techniques, such as calling 911 whenever an employee's heart rate changes. Emergency responders are there to help you with evacuation plans, crowd control, tactical air strikes and removing oxygen from affected areas.

Develop a plan to preserve essential business functions. Losing large numbers of staff to illness has a detrimental effect on minion productivity, but developments in technology can help mitigate damage and preserve mission-critical functions. Online work allows employees to access e-mail and servers from remote locations, quarantine camps or inside the "hot zone." Locate backup servers in nearby zones of negative entropy that cause all encroaching life-forms to violently lose their molecular integrity. Enacting static barriers and active-denial security measures has been shown to keep out the infected. Forewarned is forearmed, and nothing says "armed" better than razor wire, a 12-gauge and a German shepherd.

Communicate your plan clearly to employees. Making sure that everyone understands the plan thoroughly is the key to successful implementation, but miscommunicating the plan and spreading incorrect information, panic or paper-borne viruses is counterproductive. For best results, use semaphore at a minimum distance of two miles. Then shoot the messenger, just to be safe. You never know.

With these guidelines, you can rest assured that, no matter what catastrophe looms-or shambles toward you out of the bio-lab-your business will survive.

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