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Small To Medium Enterprises Face Little Sympathy With Swine Flu Absenteeism

21/07/2009

By Lea Pachta

Government figures now estimate that a third of the workforce could be absent because of swine flu. Add to that people staying at home to look after sick family or those who are in quarantine and suddenly alarming figures look a lot worse.

So what steps can SME's take to minimize the impact the loss of personnel in such numbers? Ben Rapp of Managed Networks, SME IT specialists, is a keen advocate of facilitating remote working. He explained 'People have probably forgotten that we have already seen mass absenteeism earlier this year when millions of employees were away from work because of heavy snow. At times like this, customers are initially sympathetic about unfulfilled orders or unanswered emails - after all we are all in the same situation. However, sympathy has a very short shelf life so businesses should plan now for how they will cope when fewer staff will be in the office.'

He added "The snow and tube strikes were great prompts for businesses to review remote access; we found that the more entrepreneurial of our clients were the fastest to embrace the technology. By setting up home or out-of-office access for their employees, one PR company, ENS, was able to operate as usual during the snow and won some new business as a result."

Rebecca Hopkins, ENS' MD added 'I urge other small business owners to look at how their staff can work remotely before any significant levels of sickness occur. With the right system - we happen to use DesktopLive - just because people aren't in the office there is no reason why they cannot make phone calls, respond and send emails or access documents. We won huge kudos with clients when we operated as normal and bigger suppliers didn't. I am convinced that any... continued on page two >

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