If swine flu strikes, can anyone else do your job?

With the concern over swine flu raising over the past few weeks the business implications of the virus have risen.  Our business continuity management report earlier in the year revealed that less than a quarter of companies had robust plans to deal with influenza.  This was before the swine flu situation developed around the world so the situation is only likely to have worsened since then.

So what can you do to help combat swine flu?

There are a number of measures you can take as a company to mitigate the risk of swine flu.  These include:

• Encourage home working - if people reveal symptoms of the illness allowing them to work from home can help to limit the spread of the virus.  Having the infrastructure in place to accomodate home working is crucial for this to work.
• Encourage candid disclosure of illness - in some companies and some environments disclosing illness, much less taking time off, is regarded as a sign of weakness and so people soldier on.
• Having plans to cope with absentees - the government recommend that companies should have plans in place to survive with around 15-20% absenteeism. 

It's this last point that we'll focus on in this article.

Coping with swine flu related absences

Obviously the size of your company influences the rate of absenteeism you need to prepare for.  Smaller companies or ones with small, and crucial, teams need to prepare for absences of around 30-35% for up to two weeks.  Such a 'hole' in your team could have huge consequences to the projects you're working on.  So ensuring the knowledge of each individual is captured and shared is vitally important.  Here are a few steps you can take to ensure that happens:

1. Identify a customer for this knowledge. Have a clear customer – current or future – in mind when considering the creation of a knowledge asset.
2. Get clear what your knowledge asset is really about. What is the scope of your knowledge asset? A knowledge asset needs to cover a specific area of business activity.
3. Identify a community of practice relating to this subject. The community will be the source of the knowledge in the first place the users of the knowledge in future, and the people who validate the knowledge in the knowledge asset.
4. Collate any existing material upon which you can base your knowledge asset and look for general guidelines. Provide some context so that people can understand the purpose and relevance of the knowledge asset. Are there general guidelines that you can distil out of this material?
5. Build a checklist illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist should tell the user of the knowledge asset:
           ‘What are the questions I need to ask myself?’
           ‘What are the steps that I need to take?’
   Illustrate it with examples, stories, pictures, models, quotes, video and audio clips if possible.
6. Include links to people. Create a hyperlink to the persons personal home page or e-mail address wherever you mention them in the text. Include a list of all the people with any relationship with the content
7. Validate the Guidelines. Circulate the guidelines around the community again, and ask ‘Do the guidelines accurately reflect your knowledge and experience?’ ‘Do you have anything to add?’
8. Publish the knowledge asset. Store the knowledge in a space where it can be accessed by its community. Often this will mean the company intranet.
9. Initiate a feedback and ownership process. Encourage feedback from users, so that they pick up and eliminate any invalid recommendations. Instil a sense of obligation that ‘if you use it, then you should add to it’.