How to Communicate with Staff during a Pandemic

In case of an interruption to your workflow caused by the influenza outbreak, as with other outages, you will want to notify your staff as to what they should do.

You have several choices:

1. The simplest is the telephone number, which is communicated to all staff, that they can call before coming to work to get today's status in the workplace. The message would be updated, perhaps twice a day, by a management member and would inform the staff as to whether or not the workplace would be open for staff. This number would have to have sufficient capacity for many people to call at the same time. The capacity would be determined by the size of your staff. If you have 2000+ staff, you might need telephone capacity of 50. The message would be short and could be delivered quickly. This type of service could be provided by your local telephone utility.
2. The next choice using telephony would be to use a service that provides outgoing, pre-recorded telephone messages. The message would be recorded by one of your management members and would be broadcast to all staff members, to a number of their choice (home, mobile, etc.). There are several commercial services that provide this.
3. You could provide an updated message on your internal company website that staff could go to to check if the workplace will be open today or not. This would have to be updated frequently (a couple of times a day) and could provide messages tailored to various parts of your business.
4. If sufficient numbers of your staff have modern PDAs (smart phones, iPhones, Blackberries, etc.), you could provide a message directly onto their phone telling them of the status of the workplace. This is called ‘push techology’ and requires no action on their part but the message would have to be updated frequently.