 | DROPPING LIKE FLIES | | | | | How do you cover staff sickness? | Posted by Jacqui Frost on 02/04/2012 |
As small business owners we know that staff sickness can be crippling. Whether you have one full time member of staff or 4 part timers, your entire week can be thrown by a single day's illness. Have you ever been left thinking life was so much easier when you worked alone?
 if a key staff member is off sick, what are you going to do?
It's that horrid balance isn't it? Your business has gotten big enough to warrant more members of staff to help it run smoothly but everyone is working to full capacity making it very difficult to find cover for those essential tasks if one person goes off sick.
So what can you do? Usually you are faced with four options: -
Option 1 - Cancelling your appointments and providing cover yourself
If you are a small firm then there is really no one better to cover than yourself particularly for short term sick, unless of course it has been 6 months or more since you last did the job yourself. And do you remember why you hired more staff? Often the reason is to offload those tasks you're not particularly good at or hate doing, can you really face doing them for a whole week?
Your final consideration needs to be the knock on effect to the business as you reschedule your appointments. Although most business clients will understand that these things happen, it's difficult to forget that you were let down by this company, and does raise questions in the company's ability to cope with the work they are going to do for you. Option 2 - Call someone in from their day off or holiday
If you have more than one member of staff and they are not full timers then you may be able to call someone else in. But often it is quite short notice for them to rearrange their day and even find child care. You also have to bear in mind that with working time regulations you may have to rearrange that day off or holiday which may well leave you short staffed on another occasion. Option 3 - Re-arrange other staff members
Providing there are other staff members in you can share out the essential elements of the workload between them, though this can overload them and therefore is not a feasible option if you are looking to cover three or four weeks of it. Option 4 - Outsource the work at short notice
One of the ways to ease the workload is to transfer your phones to a telephone answering service. This will leave the staff in your office to focus on tasks that are not easily outsourced without worrying about answering the telephones. A good telephone answering service will also be able to book appointments for you and answer any frequently asked questions.
If you are worried about your emails, website enquiries, your marketing plan or dealing with correspondence promptly then you could consider using a virtual assistant who can handle these enquiries for you. Often these services can be obtained in the short term and on an ad hoc basis.
Colin from The Garage at Blakesley recently had a spate of staff sickness and was relieved that they were able to divert their calls to us allowing them to handle all the enquiries at a pace they could manage without overly disrupting the business.
"The Office Genie are wonderful. In the last couple of weeks we have had a couple of members of staff off sick. They are true professionals, understanding our needs and making last minute changes for us as required."
So if you'd like to find out more about how The Office Genie can help you then please it would be a great idea to give me a call on +44 (0) 845 901 1803 or click here to send me an email. I look forward to helping!
Be magical ... 
JACQUI FROST
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