How to stop the spread of illness in your office

One thing that you as a business owner really want to avoid is having your employees call in sick mainly because if you have missing employees it can actually affect your business. If you have missing employees that means your productivity can be cut in half and your business can actually lose sales. But something else that you might not think about is that this can also happen if your employees come into work sick. Not to mention the fact that if they come into work while they are sick they are actually spreading the disease that they have. What this means is that you can end up with ten sick employees instead of only one or two.So as an employer one of your main goals is to help prevent the spread of illness in your office. Basically what this means is that you are going to need to take certain steps to help ensure that you are not allowing any kind of illness to spread in your office.

Difficulty rating: Moderate

Step one:
The first thing that you are going to need to do is to make sure that your phones, computers, keyboards, and other equipment are actually sanitized on a regular basis. The best bet you have is to make sure that they are cleaned thoroughly at least once a week. You can have your employees do this or you can talk to the janitorial company that you use about cleaning this type of equipment. But this is extremely important because these items are shared and many times germs land on them and just spread from one person to the next because of how many people are using that equipment.

Step two:
When cleaning any kind of equipment or surface in your office you should make sure that you are using the proper cleaning chemicals, commercial cleaning chemicals or bleach mixed with water in the proper amount work the best. But you also need to make sure that you are using them in accordance with their directions on the label for maximum effectiveness.

Step three:
The next thing that you need to do is to make sure that disposable tissues are available throughout the workplace. This is great for people who have runny noses or who are sneezing. If a tissue is handy they can simply grab the tissue and cover their nose and mouth while sneezing which will help prevent the spread of germs.

Step four:
You can also place around the office alcohol based hand sanitizer and encourage your employees to use it when appropriate. In fact the best time to use this stuff is when your hands aren't actually dirty, which would be after sneezing, coughing, touching infected objects such as keyboards or telephones. But the hand sanitizer actually kills all germs on your hands which helps prevent the spread of illness.

Step five:
If your employees are visible sick or you even think that they might have the flu those employees should be encouraged to stay at home so that they don't spread the disease to anybody else in the office.

Step six:
Something else that you are going to need to do is to provide a clean work environment. This includes the employees' work place, the break room, bathrooms and anywhere else that the employees must go to go about their daily routines. The cleaner your workplace is the less chance you have of finding germs and bacteria growing which can actually cause your employees to get sick.