Do you ever sit at work and listen to a co-worker sneeze, cough and sniffle his or her way through the day? Do you ever want to tap that person on the shoulder and say, “go home before you make us all sick!”?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year in the U.S., five to 20 percent of the population gets the flu. So how do you keep your business running with the cold and flu season in full swing?
An easy answer to keeping germs out of the workplace is a telework program. For all of those employees who think the world will end if they don’t show up; for all the loyal workers who don’t want to use a sick day; for employers who don’t want to allow one sick employee to infect the whole office, I have three friendly – and obvious – words of advice: Work. From. Home.
Stuart Brown, M.D., former director of the Georgia Division of Public Health, said that “someone coughing deposits germs on workplace surfaces – conference tables, the copy machine and telephones. So anything you can do to limit that helps reduce the risk of infection spreading to other employees.”
So here’s my recommendation to everyone suffering with a cold or the flu who still has manged to summon enough energy to be on the clock: Telework! Atlanta is one of the most wired cities – let’s try to make it one of the healthiest too.
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