Wednesday: Snow Days!

These days a snow day that shuts down the roads and schools poses no problems. I'm a stay at home mother and frankly, we're in Wisconsin. Often times, we find ourselves indoors during this time of year. Mothers who find themselves suddenly home from work with kids that should be in school but aren't and are becoming stir crazy, often have 'snow day' contingencies.

Such kits include art supplies only used on those days, a movie they haven't yet watched, new books (from a 2nd hand store, of course) and odds and ends *(read: chores) designed to keep the kids busy when indoors (if they're not helping shovel the driveway, of course.)

Got me thinking.

A snow day contingency kit is not a bad idea for any office. Most businesses that aren't education related are operational during rough days. But any number of events can drastically reduce your staffing, customer traffic or both. Consider flu season: clinic workers are often hit hard with this disease at a time when more and more patients arrive to be treated. Misery all around. What can be done to keep both customers and employees satisfied during these times? Or if there is a major storm where few customers are shopping and your skeleton crew employees are left standing around? Or if you head an office of mainly union workers who are striking?

Outline any such scenarios for your workplace and use your imagination! First, find the bare bones solutions: the ones that will keep the bare minimum of service and satisfaction for your people. Build on that solution to find a way to really keep them satisfied. Finally, build on the satisfying solutions to make the situation enjoyable. Using this incremental approach to brainstorming is going to open a lot of creative possibilities and give your business an advantage: many times, disasters strike more than one business. If yours is best prepared to meet the disaster, your customers and employees will not soon forget you were there for them.

The clinic I use has several levels of satisfaction that they meet during this time of year for their customers:

Functional: Separate waiting rooms for flu patients
Satisfactory: Masks, santitizing lotion given to all sick paitents, flu or not; very kind reception staff; extra nurses working in non-client connected call center to field calls and give advice if clients could potentially stay home
Enjoyable: If your wait is longer than 45 minutes, you receive a $10 gift card to Target; Lunch is also provided to employees on skeleton crew days that are busy.