As many businesses begin to officially reopen, it’s more clear than ever that COVID-19 has changed the reality of our workspace. The constant but piecemeal flow of new guidance related to COVID-19 has become a business challenge unto itself – maybe the most important one of our time, and as businesses work to reopen, it’s easy to feel like we simply don’t have enough information to do the best possible job.
In this post we’ll explore:
Why it’s so easy for the best and most well-meaning business & HR leaders to feel overwhelmed right now
The variety of areas in which COVID-19 has created new responsibilities for employers
How businesses can connect with resources to ease this transition into the new normal
The Growing Challenge of Staying Up to Date on Compliance
The federal government’s official response to COVID-19 began just two months ago on March 18 with the passing of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), mandating the expansion of paid sick leave and FMLA leave.
Since then, a variety of government agencies, from the CDC and Department of Labor to OSHA and Homeland Security have published temporary policies, interim guidance, and regulatory FAQ sheets with an eye toward helping businesses and individual American employees weather this storm.
Unfortunately, the flood of guidance during a time where many organizations were maintaining skeletal operations teams has led to information overload across much of business. Everybody wants to comply with the new regulations and follow best practices to protect employees, defeat coronavirus, and restore the economy, but staying up to date on COVID-19 has become a major job unto itself.
Clarifying the Picture: What Businesses Need to Focus On
The current situation presents three specific needs businesses must address:
Staying up to date on guidance as it is released
Implementing guidance and best practices in a well-organized way
Maintaining great documentation to ensure compliance and qualify for tax credits as applicable
If your business’ COVID-19 response and reopening strategy doesn’t have a comprehensive approach for those needs articulated, it’s a recipe for falling behind.
Staying up to Date on Guidance
An incredible variety of government agencies have published guidance or temporary policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic and economic reopening. It’s essential to know about the guidance currently on the books as well as each new piece of legislation or regulation as soon as it’s published.
This means monitoring the websites of relevant government agencies or signing up for alerts to get news about updates as soon as possible.
Implementation
Knowing COVID-19 guidance and policy is only the first part of the battle. You also have to bring those instructions and expectations to life in your workplace and among the members of your team.
You need to have specific plans in place to address all sorts of best practice implementation needs, including:
Reconfiguring your workspace
Providing & training employees on PPE
Smooth internal processes for transitioning employees on and off of leave
Temporary hiring procedures for team members who may have expired I-9 documentation
Maintaining Documentation
Federal payroll tax credits will be key to most businesses fully recovering from the financial effects of COVID-19. Thankfully, the CARES Act provides that relief, but ensuring your business gets that credits it deserves requires a strong approach to documentation.
In order to get the relief you deserve for providing your employees with paid leave, you need to provide specific documentation, and some of those requirements are only now being clarified. That means proactive recordkeeping and attention to detail are more important than ever for HR and payroll professionals.
Providing Powerful External Support to Core Business Function
Given all the new responsibilities we’ve discussed related to COVID-19, it’s easy to see why many business, finance, compliance, and HR leaders are feeling overwhelmed. One way to take pressure off your core team while also ensuring compliance is to start a relationship with a dedicated HR support partner.
With an outside specialist taking the lead on reviewing evolving guidance and breaking it down into executive summaries and actionable policy/procedural checklists for your leadership team, you can carry out a powerful reopening that’s backed by best practices without that effort subtracting from your ability to do business.
Takeaways
If you’re feeling overwhelmed from a business perspective because of the steady but disconnected flow of new guidance from various government agencies, you’re not alone! Remember:
Keeping up to date with COVID-19 policies and legislation has grown into a job unto itself and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future
It’s crucial that all businesses stay current on guidance, implement identified best practices in thoughtful ways, and maintain strong documentation in order to maximize tax credit opportunities
A designated HR partner (like Launchways!) can pick up the slack on COVID-19 regulatory concerns, enabling your business to get back to doing what you do best
How to Learn More
At Launchways, we specialize in providing HR, payroll, business insurance, and employee benefit support to organizations so their leadership can make the most of their own time and expertise. We are proud to partner with some Chicago’s most innovative and forward-thinking businesses to strengthen the local business community and connect organizations with the knowledge, tools, and human support they need to do their jobs better than ever.
As more states begin their official economic reopenings in the wake of COVID-19, many organizations feel like resuming the work itself isn’t the biggest challenge. For many of us, reengaging and rebuilding our teams of talented professionals and getting them motivated and bought-in to the new way of work is an extremely daunting task.
Many people are scared, distrustful, and depressed right now, and that is the exact opposite of the recipe for a successful team. Whether they know it or not, professionals are hungry for their employers to help them feel normal and plugged-in again. That means employee culture and engagement should be points of emphasis for every business in the coming weeks and months.
Identifying the Best Aspects of Your “Pre-COVID” Culture
It may seem like a long time ago now, but less than three months ago, you had a thriving community sharing a physical space and working towards common goals – some of your team members might even have compared it to being part of a family!
The realities of COVID-19 mean that workplace culture and team atmosphere can’t resume with perfect continuity. With that said, there is the potential to create a new, even stronger community by porting what worked about your previous approach onto new methodologies and emerging best practices in light of COVID-19.
How Do We Figure Out the Best Parts of Our Culture?
Your team members are the best source of information when it comes to which parts of your workplace culture, employee wellness initiatives, and daily perks really make a difference for them. You can get that information through employee culture surveys, which can be blasted out team-wide via email as you plan your return to the office.
If possible, you should do this work in the weeks ahead of your reopen to give your new initiatives the most possible planning time. However, if getting people back into the building is the main priority, you can use the opening weeks of the return to work to gather this data to inform your employee engagement strategy.
What About Employee Mental Health?
Workplace culture and collegiality are crucial to creating a positive work environment that drives work people can be proud about while robustly supporting people’s humanistic and mental health needs to prevent tension, frustration, and burnout.
One of your culture survey’s main goals should be determining what services you were providing that people found really valuable pre-COVID. Did they value seeing their colleagues in contexts other than work? Did they appreciate making time for serious conversations during the work week? What made them go home feeling good about themselves at the end of the day?
What Strengthened the Team?
As the old axiom goes, “teamwork makes the dream work.” While it may sound trite at first, bringing your employees together to create a true team is the difference between having a great approach to human capital management and just being a “job” where people work.
Another main concern of your employee surveys should be to identify what aspects of your pre-COVID-19 approach brought people together to create a more functional, vivacious unit. What made people feel like true colleagues and not just people who worked in the same space? How did you help team members discover, appreciate, and celebrate each other’s strengths? How did you foster an environment where people understood and were not judgmental about their colleagues’ areas of need or weakness?
What Gave People a Sense of Shared Purpose?
If you’ve got people feeling positive about themselves and their work and functioning as part of a thriving team, there’s only one real component left to a great culture: shared goals and purpose.
In order to get your employees reintegrated into the work and making up for lost time, you need to figure out what messages, incentives, and motivational tactics really worked for them. What about your organization or leadership did they find inspirational? What about the nature of your work makes team members feel good about what they’re doing? What approaches to shared success and shared failure spoke to them?
Leveraging Technology to Modify & Modernize
Once you’ve drawn out the aspects of your workplace and employee culture that really worked and inspired excellence, you’ll likely have a long list of activities and approaches that feel like a real challenge to recreate in the context of social distancing.
At first, this can feel discouraging, but luckily, the last few months have seen an explosion of remote communication and interaction platforms that enable us to continue positive community interactions without the risk of viral transmission.
Migrating Physical Interactions Online
Video conferencing and project management platforms have picked up much of the slack during our time away from the office, and they also offer opportunities for employee culture reengagement.
Think of ways you can allow people to “take a walk” to visit friends in other departments for a quick chat like they used to. Provide people with document sharing and collaboration tools that make it just as easy to work together as if you were sitting at the same table. Consider meeting in a text-based chatroom where people have time to think about their responses and process other people’s ideas at their own pace.
All of these are different ways we can use emerging work tools as culture tools as well!
Embracing an Opportunity to Grow & Redefine the Work
It’s important to understand that there will not be a cut and dry way to completely recreate our previous approach to office life and employee culture post-COVID-19. We will need to stay open-minded and identify employee needs in order to find solutions and approaches that support them.
With that in mind, this is an opportunity to grow and redefine what it even means to be a business, a team, and a professional. The new work will be finding ways to continue and extend intellectual and communal closeness without the benefit of physical proximity.
If we stay open minded, remain grounded in what we know works and what employees need, and keep our ears to the ground for the best emerging tools and solutions, we’ll be able to reopen the business space in a powerful way that makes all of us better.
How to Learn More
If you’re an HR professional or business leader looking to guide a successful reopening as COVID-19 continues, be sure to download Launchways’ Complete Return to Work Toolkit. The toolkit provides a variety of checklists and other resources that help you consider reopening from every conceivable angle, including:
Recalling furloughed or laid off employees
Modifying your physical workspace
Best practices for employee safety
Personal protective equipment (PPE)
New policies for meeting, communication, shared space, etc.
We all know that we need to modify the way we work to adapt in the wake of COVID-19. One of the main changes businesses are exploring is daily employee health screenings.
Health screenings help employers protect their teams and ongoing work by keeping coronavirus out of their offices. However, many employers aren’t sure how to roll out a program or approach communicating with their team about the transition toward workplace COVID screenings.
In this post we’ll:
Describe what an effective COVID-19 employee screening program looks like
Explain what employees need to know about your new health screening procedures
Provide a memo template you can use to communicate with your employees in a way that explains your program and builds buy-in
Connect you with more resources to simplify and strengthen your return-to-work plan
What Strong COVID-19 Screening at Work Looks Like
A Clear Team & Point of Contact
COVID-19 screening should be conducted by a designated professional or team with strong knowledge of CDC guidance on COVID-19 symptomology and prevention. Those professionals must be protected with proper personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks, gloves, and potentially face shields, to protect their own health and minimize their potential as vectors for the employees they’re screening.
Temperature Checks
Employees should be checked for temperatures upon arrival at work and sent home if they exhibit fevers of 100.4 °F or higher.
How do we capture temperatures in a safe, compliant way?
Temperature checks should be carried out with a touchless temporal thermometer and avoid direct skin contact to minimize potential spread of the COVID-19 virus and other germs.
Respiratory Health Screening Questions
In addition to checking temperatures, your screening team should have each employee complete a short questionnaire describing their current respiratory health with an eye towards identifying red flags.
This guide from the Department of Health provides guidelines for which symptoms should be included in a COVID-19 employee health screening, including providing a model questionnaire.
What Employees Need to Know About Workplace COVID-19 Screening
Of course, the final piece of a great implementation plan is a strong employee communication strategy. When you’re communicating with you team effectively, it fosters engagement and helps your employees see that you’re focused on safety and taking steps to reopen with everybody’s health in mind.
Before you reopen with your new workplace health screening system in place, you need to contact your team through whatever official channels you’ve been using during your temporary shutdown or remote work to alert them that screenings will be taking place upon your reopen and providing them with the information they need to comply with and feel comfortable with this new procedure.
Below, we’ll provide a memo template we’ve built to help businesses simplify this process. First, though, let’s talk about what information your employees absolutely need to know to reduce return-to-work anxiety and ensure your workplace reopen is a success.
Why You’re Screening Employees at Work
To some people, lining up for a health inspection as you head into work sounds like something from a dystopian science fiction novel. You need to set a positive tone and help your employees understand that these new procedures are for their health and wellness, not simply the wellbeing and liability of the company.
The better you can explain your rationale for new health screening protocols in a humanistic, talent-centric way, the better you’ll be able to win buy-in.
When/Where Screening Will Occur
Before your reopen occurs, employees need to know how to comply with the new COVID-19 screening protocols. That means you they need to know when and how often screenings occur, where to go, and who to make contact with.
Remember, you can only expect compliance and enthusiasm about your new procedures when you’ve made the effort to communicate. If people show up to work and see a line they’re not expecting, it’s a recipe for disharmony and frustration.
What the Screening Entails
Nobody likes to go into any kind of “test” without knowing the expectations. Your health screening procedure needs to be clear and transparent for employees ahead of time to reduce anxiety.
What kind of questions will they need to answer?
Your employees should know the respiratory screening questions they’ll be asked ahead of time to ensure they understand what they’re being asked and have the opportunity to ask questions about interpretation of either your HR team or their own personal healthcare professional.
How will temperature checks work?
No one likes the idea of being poked or prodded, especially with a potentially virus-covered tool. By ensuring your employees you’ll be monitoring their temperature using no-touch tools and will have screeners use PPE in a way that aligns with best practices, you can minimize anxiety about the physical aspects of the health screening.
Launchways’ Employee Health Screening Memo Template
How to Use This Tool
The following template provides a basic form letter you can modify to inform employees of your new COVID-19 screening protocols. Keep in mind you’ll need to make some modifications to this memo, including:
Adding your company’s name
Clarifying the effective date for screenings
Specifying the location for screenings
Communicating who will carry out the screenings
Establishing a point of contact for questions/concerns about this process
The Template
Memo: COVID-19 Employee-Screening Procedures
Effective [date], all employees reporting to work will be screened for respiratory symptoms and have their body temperature taken as a precautionary measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
Every employee will be screened, including having his or her temperature taken, when reporting to work. Employees should report to [location] upon arrival at work and prior to entering any other areas of [company name] property.
Each employee will be screened privately by [insert name or position] using a touchless forehead/ temporal artery thermometer. The employee’s temperature and answers to respiratory symptom questions will be documented, and the record will be maintained as a private medical record.
Time spent waiting for the health screening should be recorded as time worked for nonexempt employees.
An employee who has a fever at or above 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or who is experiencing coughing or shortness of breath will be sent home. The employee should monitor his or her symptoms and call a doctor or use telemedicine if concerned about the symptoms.
An employee sent home can return to work when:
He or she has had no fever for at least three (3) days without taking medication to reduce fever during that time; AND
Any respiratory symptoms (cough and shortness of breath) have improved for at least three (3) days; AND
At least seven (7) days have passed since the symptoms began.
An employee may return to work earlier if a doctor confirms the cause of an employee’s fever or other symptoms is not COVID-19 and releases the employee to return to work in writing.
An employee who experiences fever and/or respiratory symptoms while home should not report to work. Instead, the employee should contact his or her immediate supervisor for further direction.
How to Learn More
If you’re an HR professional or business leader looking to guide a successful reopening as COVID-19 continues, be sure to download Launchways’ Complete Return to Work Toolkit. The toolkit provides a variety of checklists and other resources that help you consider reopening from every conceivable angle, including:
Recalling furloughed or laid off employees
Modifying your physical workspace
Best practices for employee safety
Personal protective equipment (PPE)
New policies for meeting, communication, shared space, etc.
When extending work-from-home is the better option
For the last two months, businesses and professionals around the nation have held their breath waiting for the go-ahead to reopen and get back to work. Now that those orders are in place and the dates to resume business are nearing, it’s essential that physical workspaces across America are ready to support employees and keep everybody safe and healthy under the rules of the new reality.
In light of these emerging needs, Launchways is proud to announce our partnership with ATrend Safety, a local Chicago-area company that has been reborn with the purpose of enabling employers and employees to get back to work in the safest possible environment.
In this post we’ll:
Introduce Atrend Safety and their approach to workplace safety
Describe the services available to Launchways clients through Atrend Safety
Explain how you can learn more
Meet Atrend
Before COVID-19, Atrend was one of the industry’s most respected international manufacturers of electronics and audio equipment, especially for vehicles. However, with the coronavirus crisis, Atrend decided to retool their production facilities to create personal protective equipment (PPE) and other workplace safety equipment to support social distancing.
If you’re interested in learning more about Atrend’s electronics and audio empire and their community-focused reemergence as Atrend Safety, click here!
What Can Atrend Safety Do for Launchways Clients?
Atrend Safety provides end-to-end workplace COVID-19 safety services, including assessment of your current environment, recommendations for PPE and safety strategy based on CDC and WHO recommendations, and assistance creating your new employee safety policy.
Once that assessment and plan articulation are completed, Atrend Safety can connect you directly with the PPE you need, including:
Disposable face masks
Reusable/washable facemasks (with your company logo or preferred pattern)
Face shields
Gloves
Vinyl floor graphics to communicate foot traffic patterns
Thermometers and body temperature checking stations
Hand sanitization stations
Safety screens for cabs and ride shares
Launchways and Atrend Safety
Atrend’s pivot toward PPE is a perfect example of how Chicago-area businesses are coming together and problem-solving in new ways in the wake of COVID-19. Their dedication to enabling the work of their colleagues in the Midwest business community stands as an example for all of us.
At Launchways, we were eager to partner with Atrend, both because of their community-focused response and because of their ability to provide clients with a streamlined consultative experience that demystifies the workplace safety questions that have so many business leaders looking for answers right now.
The fact that Atrend can deliver the PPE businesses require in addition to assessing their environment and making recommendations streamlines the reopen process significantly, limiting the number of vendors and consultants businesses leaders have to turn to.
How to Learn More
If you’re a business owner, finance leader, or HR professional trying to figure out how to adapt your physical workspace for social distancing and incorporate PPE best practices into your approach, Atrend Safety can help you today.
To learn more about a consultation or PPE purchases from Atrend, enter your information here and a member of the Launchways team will be in touch to discuss all your business’ COVID-19 workforce needs.
Takeaways
During these unprecedented times, it’s important to keep our eyes and ears open for stories about businesses who are finding new ways to thrive, serve their customers, and adapt to the new normal in the world of COVID-19.
Atrend Safety is a great example of an organization that adapted to meet the needs of the community and serve Chicago-area businesses in ways that will simplify and power the economic revitalization of our metro area in the coming months.
Remember:
Atrend, an audio and electronics leader here in the Midwest, has retooled as Atrend Safety, a workplace safety consultant and PPE manufacturing company
Atrend Safety provides end-to-end services, helping you scope your environment, devise a new workplace safety plan, and providing you with the PPE you need
Atrend Safety’s services are currently available to all that are part of the Launchways community!
As the majority of states transition toward some level of economic reopening, many professionals are scared that the economy is claiming priority above their health and wellbeing. If not addressed directly, this perception could easily lead to a disconnect between leadership and the ground-level team, significantly hampering our collective ability to make a strong economic recovery.
Addressing and reducing reasonable employee anxieties in the wake of COVID-19 is absolutely essential to our new way of business. Moving forward, we’ll explore:
The increased importance of clear and humanistic communication
How health screenings can provide employees with reassurance
Why it’s crucial to articulate a vision for the “new normal” of each role
How you can connect with impactful resources to aid your reopen
Explain Your COVID-19 Response Strategy Ahead of Time
In an information vacuum, panic is the default setting. The less your employees know ahead of your reopen, the lower their morale/enthusiasm/buy-in level will be. That means communication is the first cornerstone to a successful transition back to business.
Before you order employees back to their workstations, you need to clarify how you’re adapting or modifying the way you do work to protect everybody’s health. You also need to explain why you’re returning to work – why it’s the right choice for the business as a whole as well as your team in general.
If you fail to address either of those two concerns, your employees will probably have trouble believing you have their best interests at heart. If you aren’t making modifications, it seems like you’re taking them for granted. If you can’t explain why this is the right time to reopen, how can they be sure leadership is being strategic and not just reactionary?
Use Screening Questions & Temperature Checks
Your employees’ main concern about reopening is that they will be exposed to COVID-19 or bring it home to their families. In order to earn their trust, you need to show them that transmission isn’t going to happen in your workplace.
By creating a screening protocol to use before and during your reopen, you communicate that you’re dedicated to keeping COVID-19 out of the office and maintaining a safe, healthy environment.
Screening Before Reopen
While it’s true COVID-19 is frequently spread by people who are not yet feeling symptoms of the virus, you can still take major steps to protect your team collectively and as individuals by preventing as many symptom-positive individuals and recent exposures from entering your office or workspace.
Before your official reopen date, you should contact your employees to determine:
Who is currently ill with COVID-19 or similar symptoms
Who has been exposed to or cared for someone with COVID-19 in the last 14 days
Who has been advised by a doctor to stay home due indefinitely due to increased risk (i.e. who requires ADA accommodations?)
Who is currently the only source of childcare for a minor
Those questions will help you determine the scale of your re-open and identify areas of HR need in terms of transitioning employees to expanded sick or FMLA leave under the FFCRA. If responses indicate that staffing is not currently feasible, you may need to consider delaying your reopen or considering alternative staffing solutions.
Temperature Checks as Your Reopen
Temperature checks at the door prove to employees that nobody in the building currently has a fever (one of the most common COVID-19 symptoms). That reassurance goes a long way to helping people feel like they’re in a COVID-free environment.
However, if you’re going to administer temperature checks, you need to think about things like:
What is the exact temperature threshold for denying an employee entry?
How will you transition employees with fever to paid leave or work-from-home?
Who will administer the temperature screenings?
How will send-homes be documented?
How will you address employees who come to work with other symptoms but no fever?
What about Customers? What about Visitors? What about the Public?
To this point, we’ve been discussing screening your employees to keep the environment safe. With that said, the members of your team probably trust each other fairly well; it may be potential outsiders they’re nervous about.
If you run a hospitality, retail, healthcare, or other business where there’s frequent interaction with customers/the public, you need screening procedures in place to prevent your employees from becoming sick. Similarly, if you maintain an office where business travelers are often hosted, you need to reassure your core team members that you don’t have an open-door policy for the virus.
Whether it’s temperature checks, sneeze guards/partitions, or some other solution that makes sense for the work you do, it’s absolutely crucial you let your employees know you’re thinking about protecting their health from others.
Provide a Clear Vision for Every Role
In order for each employee to feel safe and empowered continuing their career in general and role in your organization specifically after COVID-19, they must feel like there is a specific plan in place for them.
Right now, professionals are hungry to know what their day-to-day work will look like moving forward for the next year or two. The more information and transparency you can provide, the better you can win your team’s trust and buy-in.
That means getting together with departmental and team leaders to make sure you’ve addressed what work will look like when you re-open for each individual employee. If that sounds like a challenging task, that’s because it is – but it’s absolutely a best practice for getting return-to-work right on a level that allows you to leverage the full productivity and enthusiasm of the team you’ve built.
For each role within the company, you need to address:
How their physical workspace needs to/will be modified to keep them safe
How their interactions with colleagues, customers, and the public need to/will be modified
What kind of personal protective equipment (PPE) they’ll need on a daily basis and what you will supply
What new cleaning/disinfection responsibilities they’ll have, both for individual workstations and common/shared spaces they use
A chain of command for reporting concerns/issues about reopening, adherence to new policies, etc.
Takeaways
Returning to the office in the aftermath of the unexpected coronavirus pandemic is truly the great challenge of our time. If we just flip the switch back to “on” and act like nothing’s changed, we’re sure to lose the employee buy-in that makes productivity and innovation happen.
If you’re hoping to reopen in a way that rallies your team and sets the tone for safe, positive work moving forward, it’s important to remember:
Your employees need advance notice of new policies and procedures to feel safe
You need to be able to explain how you’re protecting employees from potential COVID-19 exposure
Your approach to reopening needs to address every role and business process that’s directly or indirectly affected by COVID-19
How to Learn More
If you’re an HR or business leader looking to guide a successful reopening as COVID-19 continues, be sure to download Launchways’ Complete Return to Work Toolkit. The toolkit provides a variety of checklists and other resources that help you consider every aspect of reopening, including:
Recalling furloughed or laid off employees
Modifying your physical workspace
Best practices for employee safety
Personal protective equipment (PPE)
New policies for meeting, communication, shared space, etc.
