Company condolensces

System

Our company has always tried to send flowers and a sympathy card to employees that have lost loved ones. Recently we failed to do that, due primarily to a lack of information. We are a family owned company of about 350 employees. We feel awful about the incident and I am looking for a procedure that will help insure that doesn't happen again. How do other companies insure that they are informed of the loss of an employees' close family member?

Janet

Although we don't send flowers to employees' family members, we do send flowers to retirees who have died. The two best ways we've found is to 1) check the obits in the newspaper every day; and 2) rely on word of mouth. You may not catch every one, but I don't know of any we've missed thus far.

DB

At a company I worked for previously (about the size of your company), we used the following system: We asked specific employees throughout the company (different departments, floors, locations, etc) to contact the HR Director's secretary anytime an employee lost a loved one. The secretary was the only one to order the flowers but we had a lot of eyes and ears around the company this way. Pick employees who are well liked by their co-workers and reliable. We started by asking employees who had volunteered for the Employee Activity Community and branched off from there when need. No one was pressured to participate, we would just ask someone else in the area. Also, some times supervisors would recommend someone in their area who would be good for this task. You can emphasize the importance of this task by letting the volunteers know about the recent oversight and how the company is trying to avoid that in the future with the employees' assistance.