Training alert on publicity

As a trainer, you probably know that you want to teach all employees one very important thing: Keep us off the front page of the paper.

Publicity is great, but clearly we’re in a service sector that needs to be very fussy about the type of publicity we get.

Here’s an example: Last week, apparently someone checked actress Brooke Shields’ mom out of an assisted living community to take her to lunch. Sounds harmless, and why not let an “old friend” take a resident out to lunch?

The problem was this: the “old friend” was a National Enquirer reporter; Brooke Shields’ mom has dementia.

The other problem was that, according to the reporter, she asked permission to take the resident out and the staff gave it to her.

So what if, for the purposes of training, you decided to play act this scenario? Can you imagine that all of your clients are parents of famous people? What should you do, in terms of protecting the privacy of your clients, while at the same time ensuring that their rights are not violated?

A great topic for a staff training session, in my opinion. Have fun with this; let me know what you discover!