Everyone knows that it is important to have the number for the fire department, the police and a doctor or paramedic prominently displayed in an office. In the unlikely event of an emergency of life-threatening proportions, the last thing you want is for people to lose time while trying to find the details of a doctor.
These numbers need to be prominently displayed in a few places around the office. But these are not the only numbers you need to have available for all staff. Your office manager will not be present all the time, and neither will you, and there will still be situations that need to be dealt with. To help with your planning, here are some of the other numbers that you should have on display.
Stay cool no matter what
Almost inevitably, the air conditioning will break at some stage. In a typical office, the temperature is constantly being changed by dueling colleagues who are either too hot or cold. This tweaking of the rheostat can eventually cause it to break, and then the temperature rockets to unworkable levels.
The last thing you want is for staff to be Googling ‘ducted heating service Melbourne or something similar, hoping to find a solution. Let them know your preferred partner and display their number prominently.
Building management
Assuming that you don’t own your offices, you need to ensure that the number for building management is clearly shown. Suppose the tenant above you leaves a tap running if something is structurally wrong with the building if an alarm keeps going off. Whatever the emergency, the building managers need to be easily contactable.
IT people
The internet and the technology that goes with it are an inevitable part of doing business in the modern era. And part of that deal is that it falls over and stops working from time to time.
If you don’t have a full-time IT support team, then the number for the on-call support team needs to be made known to the staff. The last thing you want is paying people to work, but they cannot due to technology failure. Make sure that this can never be the case.
Your details
Some bosses don’t like to have their staff contact them, but this should never be the case. Yes, you might have protocols and escalation procedures, but all staff should feel they can reach the top if they need to.
You never quite know why this might happen, but almost any business owner will tell you about freak occurrences where there have been emergencies and Who could not follow escalation procedures. Your staff will not be phoning you for a chat or to update the football scores; they will call you if there is an emergency, and you should encourage them to do so.
Television people
If your office has televisions, you have presumably got them there for a reason, which means they need to work. Make sure that the numbers for your satellite or cable guys are on the list of numbers displayed.
There are often issues with televisions as there are lots of moving parts. The satellite dishes, the set-top boxes, the televisions themselves… the list could go on. You don’t want your staff to fix the problems as this usually compounds them. Rather make sure that Who can contact help easily.