Employers are starting to grapple with how best to react to a flu outbreak, and an article in today’s StarTribune highlights a conference at which health care professionals provided advice.    Some pointers:

• Prepare a plan now if you haven’t already;
• The priority should be to encourage sick workers to stay home without fear of losing their jobs;
• Employees should stay home until they have been free of fever for at least 24 hours; most absences will be 3-5 days long;
• Employees with children will need extra consideration;
• Doctors won’t be able to keep up with requests for paperwork from employees, so you may need to relax your “doctor’s note” requirement ; and
• It is appropriate to instruct obviously sick employees to go home in order to protect the health of co-workers, as long as you are consistent in doing so with all employees (or at least all employees in the same job category).

The bottom line is that employers are going to have to be more flexible — and probably more generous — with sick leave if flu season is especially bad this year.