Helping Employees Deal with this

drunkle

Although my office is closed today in San Francisco, tomorrow I want to be there for my employees. We are a small office 50 employees with two in NY. Maybe those of us online today can discuss some of the measure we can take to help our employees deal with the grief and anger that this is going to create.

I plan on putting together an email for our top managers with a list of signs they should be aware of, attendence, lack of interest, anger problems. I am also going to try and get the CEO to hold a group meeting to address this, to ask employees to come to us if they need to talk etc.

What are some of you going to do??

Margaret Morford

All of your people will feel better if they can help in some way. Can you give them time off to give blood? How about organizing some sort of relief effort? Challenge some local companies your size to a fund raising or challenge your competitors. You can help your employees not to feel so helpless by providing the structure for making a contribution.

Our thoughts and prayers are with all of you who may have lost someone. But we are Americans, regardless of our differences, and we will weather this together as a nation.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

Jarrett

We shuttled employees to give blood yesterday. Have a room set aside for grief counseling information. We have several television sets throughout the company (We are a Resort) for update information, we had a gathering for reflection, and we will bring counselors on property if needed. And, we typically set up donation bins when needs arise.

WOCO Frank

We had just held a company blood drive this summer; when the more immediate stages of grief and shock have passed I will use the occasion to thank those employees who participated *before* there was a national emergency. I think its great that the country has responded to this crisis, but to me, it's the people who do the right thing when there isn't an emergency who are the real heroes.
I also gave all my Guard/Reserves employees the option to go home yesterday and began preparing their managers for potential scheduling problems.

Beyond the work-related issues, we're not doing anything, really. If we discover that an employee lost a loved one in this tragedy, for example, we'll respond appropriately, but I'm not expecting anything along those lines.

On a side note... I work for a regional oil/gas wholesaler and retailer. Those of us in senior management decided yesterday to price our products at our cost through the weekend. Our local competitors aren't happy, but we'll be damned if we're going to profit from fear, uncertainty, and hysteria.

Gar

Bravo!!!

Gillian

We have students and employees to be concerned about, including some students from the East Coast and many Middle Eastern students. We have a psychologist from our EAP who was on site all day yesterday and today. We made phone banks available to students to call in and out. We tried to establish contact with our students who are on rotation in the New York area. We have another meeting this morning to assess yesterday and to see if we need to continue or modify our actions of yesterday.

Gar

We're a local government and we're giving employees time-off to donate blood.

System

We at HRHero.com have compiled some advice on dealing with this tragedy, including some legal and HR issues you might not have thought of. We hope it helps. It's at
[url]http://www.hrhero.com/headlines/tragedy.shtml[/url]

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers

NancyJo

We have declared "U. S. PRIDE" day tomorrow and are encouraging all employees to wear red, white and blue. We are flying our outside flag at half-mast. We, too, are allowing people to leave and donate blood. One of the women in our office made ribbons for all of us to wear. It's a yellow ribbon with a black stripe over it and a tiny bow made from fabric that resembles a flag. If only we could do more!

Dianna

First idea - open a forum for employees to give you ideas as to what your company might do. This will be a big boost for people to put their own ideas to work.

We just had a couple of wonderful ideas brought to us by one of our team members. We do a year-round fundraiser for a national charity. One fundraiser idea is doing early paychecks (one day early if you pay $1.00) and dress-down days for $2.00 for business casual and $5.00 for jean day. This team member just suggested that we designate upcoming paycheck days and casual days for the Red Cross.

We are also working with our owners to coordinate a blood drive.

Working together is going to be what gets us through this. May God bless this great nation!!

Terry

This morning SHRM has posted information on their web page to help deal with the tragedy. The page is [url]www.shrm.org[/url].