What to Do if an Employee Gets COVID-19

by Carolyn Kick | Apr 3, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

From supply chain disruptions to shrinking demand, business owners have to contend with a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. But often the most stressful task is protecting employees from exposure while keeping your business running. Fear of an office outbreak is causing plenty of sleepless nights for business and HR leaders alike.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve written a lot about how to protect your employees and your business from the effects of COVID-19. But one issue that we have not covered in detail is what to do when the worst happens and one of your employees tests positive for the highly-contagious virus.

So we’ve created a handy checklist for employers to use to structure their response. The checklist contains all the essential steps for protecting the rest of your team from exposure, looking after the employee’s wellbeing, and managing their transition back to the workplace.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues this checklist will help you tackle:

Working with the Affected Employee

Before you can work with the employee to determine next-steps, you need to identify that they have or are caring for someone with coronavirus. So, it’s important to regularly emphasize how crucial it is that employees who think that they or a loved one has COVID-19 notify you as soon as possible.

Once they do tell you that they have been exposed or infected, you should find out from them who they have worked closely with in the past two weeks. Getting this information can help you prevent a widespread outbreak by putting extra protection measures in place for high-risk employees. Next, you should plan the next steps for the employee by either setting them up to work remotely or helping them file for relief through the Family Medical Leave Act.

Updating the Rest of the Team

No one wants to find out that their company has been hiding the fact that a coworker has COVID-19. It’s important for your employees’ safety and your reputation as an employer that you notify your entire team that an employee has tested positive for COVID-19, is thought to have the virus, or is caring for someone with the virus. Just remember to maintain the required amount of confidentiality to protect the affected employee.

Next, reemphasize the importance of following proper procedures in the workplace as it is especially important in the days after an employee has tested positive. Conduct training or share resources to help employees reduce their risk of exposure. And notify any other tenants in your building, if applicable, so that they can manage their response.

Maintaining a Safe Workplace

When it looks like an infected employee may have entered your place of business, be it an office or a manufacturing facility, you have to take immediate action to disinfect the area. While employees should be particularly careful once you notify them of the risk, you still have your own responsibilities to minimize that risk. Clean common areas and the employee’s workspace thoroughly.

Planning the Employee’s Return to Work

Whether the infected employee has been working from home or taking a leave of absence, it’s important to know when it is safe for them to come back to work as normal. The downloadable checklist below lays out different standards depending on whether or not the employee will be tested to confirm that they are no longer contagious. But both cases depend on how long it has been since an employee’s symptoms appeared and how long it has been since they subsided. As a general rule of thumb, they should be asymptomatic for at least three days and have first shown symptoms more than a week ago for it to be safe for them to return to work.

Download the Checklist

We’ve gone over the general best-practices for when an employee tests positive for COVID-19 and given you some concrete steps to take. But the checklist will give you an in-depth step-by-step reference to guide on how to handle when one of your employees has COVID-19. Download it for free right now!

CARES Act Brings Bailout Protections for Individuals & Businesses

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 26, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

Just before midnight Wednesday night, the Senate passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The Act creates further economic protections for individuals and businesses in addition to the FMLA and paid sick team leave expansions created by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act.

Generally speaking, CARES strengthens the safety net of unemployment insurance, offers new tax credits for businesses and individuals, and creates an emergency lending fund of more than $450 billion for businesses and municipalities.

In this post we’ll explore:

• Additional unemployment protections for individuals under CARES
• The employer-facing tax credits created by CARES
• The employee/individual-facing tax credits created by CARES
• How CARES enables emergency lending
• Other useful protections under CARES

Unemployment Insurance Expansion Under CARES

The major impact of CARES for the general workforce is the significant expansion of unemployment insurance (UI). UI benefits are set to increase $600 per week for up to four months, and federal funds will continue providing UI to those losing their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic for up to 13 weeks after state unemployment benefits have been exhausted.

The federal government is also creating incentives to encourage states to reduce their UI waiting periods so workers can maintain consistency of income following a layoff and looking to increase accessibility for the self-employed and others who have historically not qualified for UI.

Tax Credits Under CARES

From a dollars and cents perspective, CARES clarifies and defines the tax credits that legislators have been promising since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak.

How to Understand Your Eligibility for CARES Tax Credits

Your eligibility (as an individual or business) for CARES tax credits depends on your 2019 tax return (or 2018 if you did not file last year). If you qualify for additional credits due to income/profit loss after your 2020 tax return, you will receive those as well. If you qualified during 2019 but do not based on 2020 filings, you still qualify.

CARES Tax Credits for Employers

CARES creates a variety of new employer tax benefits, including:

• A 50% refundable payroll tax credit on wages paid up to $10,000 per employee is available for businesses posting a 50% or worse return in gross receipts compared to the same quarter of last year
  • For businesses with more than 100 employees, this credit applies to all workers on leave who are under your employ but not working
  • For businesses with 100 or fewer employees, this credit applies to all employees
• A delay on employer-side Social Security tax payments until 1/1/2021
• A delay on aviation excise tax payments until 1/1/2021
• An exclusion of eligible student loan payments (up to $5,250 per employee) from taxable income calculations
• A suspension on the excise tax for alcohol used to make hand sanitizer for all of tax year 2020

CARES Tax Credits for Individuals/Employees

CARES create a refundable tax credit (the “Recovery Rebate”) of $1,200 per individual or $2,400 per jointly filing couple plus an additional $500 credit for each child. Income limits/qualifications for those credits are as follows:

• Individual/Single taxpayers must have a taxable income of less than $75,000 to qualify for the full credit and less than $99,000 to receive any credit
• Heads of Household must have a taxable income of less than $112,500 to qualify
• Jointly filing couples must have a taxable income of less than $150,000 to qualify for the full credit and less than $198,000 to receive any credit

Access to Emergency Lending

In addition to providing tax credits for businesses affected by coronavirus, CARES also creates a $454 billion dollar emergency lending fund for businesses, states, and cities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund will be overseen by a Congressional Oversight Commission and a Special Inspector General.

The fund includes but is not limited to:

• $25 billion allocated for lending to airlines
• $17 billion allocated for lending to national security-critical organization
• $4 billion allocated for lending to cargo/shipping/supply chain firms

In order to qualify for these emergency loans, businesses:

• Must retain 90% of their March 24, 2020 employee count
• Must not engage in stock buybacks during the duration of the loan plus one year

Other CARES Considerations

Payroll Protection for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses

CARES creates a $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program fund for businesses with fewer than 500 employees struggling to make payroll or cover operational expenses between February 15 and June 30.

Technically, these funds are granted in the form of loans, but the loans will be forgiven as long as funds are used for payroll, rent, interest on mortgages. However, that loan forgiveness will be reduced proportionately if businesses shrink their workforce or reduce overall employee compensation 25% or more.

Eliminating Early Withdrawal Penalties for 401(k)s & IRAs

CARES waives the 10% early withdrawal penalty of 401(k)s, IRAs, and certain qualified trusts and annuities for individual taxpayers facing virus-related challenges. Withdrawn amounts will be taxed over the next three years, but individuals can also replenish the withdrawn funds during that same three-year period without affecting their cap.

This effectively unlocks long-term savings for a large number of Americans, making up for work reductions, layoffs, and other challenges facing individuals and families.

The Coronavirus Relief Fund

The CARES Act establishes a $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund for state and city government expenditures related to the coronavirus epidemic and resulting public health emergency. Funds will be divided based on population, with each state receiving at least $1.25 billion.

Takeaways

The CARES Act clarifies the federal government’s approach to economic protections for individuals and businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak, filling in many of the gaps in the language of the FFCRA and other recent guidance related to coronavirus. Specifically, the Act entails:

• $600/week unemployment insurance expansion
• Tax credits for lost productivity (for large businesses) and overall staffing impact (for small businesses)
• Tax credits for individuals based on their income and family size
• An emergency lending fund for businesses & municipalities
• Payroll protections for small businesses
• Eliminating retirement withdrawal penalties for individuals facing virus-based need

COVID-19 Is Hitting Growing Businesses the Hardest: Here’s What They Can Do

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 26, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

In the last few weeks, the global economy has felt the pinch of coronavirus in a major way. The stock market has been dangerously volatile, and the federal government has announced a multi-trillion-dollar bailout.

While the media focus has been primarily on the economic impact for large corporations and mom n’ pop shops such as small retailers and restaurants, some of the biggest pain is being felt right in the middle of those two worlds – among early stage or growing businesses who were just getting their feet under them when the COVID-19 outbreak began.

For business, finance, and HR leaders at VC-backed startups or boutique companies that started small and bootstrapped up to business relevance, this is without question a time of tremendous uncertainty. Moving forward, we’ll explore:

• Some of the biggest challenges facing growing or early-stage businesses right now
• Ways growing businesses can address, manage, or outsource these challenges to preserve core function and the ability to keep the work going

How COVID-19 is Creating Challenges for Growing Businesses

During this time, it’s crucial to fully dedicate yourself to protecting your team as individual employees while also protecting the health of your business overall. That requires recognizing each individual challenge and addressing it effectively.

Here are some of the most complex, relevant problems that the leadership team at any growing business must address to weather this storm:

Increased Impact of Each Illness or Leave

Growing businesses operate with lean teams out of necessity. That means each professional manages more individual responsibilities and has a greater impact on overall business function than they would in a corporate setting.

That model works well when you’ve built a great team and everybody is healthy and engaged, but in a scenario like the COVID-19 outbreak, in which employees may need to take weeks off at a time due to severe illness, it is without question an area of weakness.

Creating an effective coronavirus response plan at the early-stage or growing business level requires creating a comprehensive strategy for how you’ll plug holes, rotate responsibilities, and maintain the quality and consistency of your core function.

Required PTO & FMLA Expansion

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which goes into effect on April 1, requires that any business with 500 or fewer employees must provide:

• Two weeks (up to 80 hours) of paid sick time at their normal rate for employees who are sick with, experiencing symptoms of, or awaiting a diagnosis for COVID-19
• Two weeks (up to 80 hours) of paid sick time at 2/3 their normal rate for employees who are caring for someone with COVID-19 or providing childcare for minors whose schools or normal daycare facilities are closed due to COVID-19

That means a lot of growth-stage or medium-sized businesses will need to pay employees for significant time during which they are minimally productive. Tax credits to cover these increased expenses have been announced, but that does little to help smaller organizations who may experience short-term cashflow or liquidity issues during this pandemic.

In the short term, you need to be ready for employees to go on leave (as we mentioned above), but you also need to gather your core finance team and figure out how you’ll provide the leave your team members need while protecting your business’ ability to maintain operations in a way that keeps you afloat.

Exposing Lack of HR Scaffolding

Most growth-stage businesses do not have an internal asset dedicated to the Human Resources function. In fact, many early-stage companies have their CEO or CFO also managing CHRO responsibilities.

That system can work well under normal circumstances, but it certainly wasn’t designed to manage a time like this, when HR communication, employee benefits education/accessibility, and leave request processing are so crucial.

That means you need to protect, strengthen, and expand your core HR function and resources to ensure you’re able to address and meet all employee needs during this time. Make no mistake: HR is a critical function within each individual organization working to combat COVID-19. The better your HR function (whether internal or outsourced) is able to understand and address employee health needs in a timely fashion, the stronger and more informed your COVID-19 response can be.

How You Can Get the Outside Support You Need

As we’ve uncovered, there are a variety of areas in which the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting new and growing businesses harder than nearly anybody else in the business space. We’ve also seen that most of those challenges are directly connected to business function and require extensive leadership planning and attention in ways that can be quite intimidating to lean teams with little or no HR bandwidth.

If you’re in one of those leadership positions, things can feel pretty discouraging right now, but the good news is there are resources you can tap into to get the answers you need, shore up your business, and maintain the productivity of your healthy team.

Start Working with a Trusted HR Partner

Growing businesses with internal HR resources typically have highly functional HR leaders who specialize in wearing a variety of hats and working around the clock to get things done. In these types of organizations, one or two people frequently do the job of what would be a fifteen-plus person team in the corporate world.

However, no matter how great they are at their jobs, those professionals need support right now. They need an extra sets of eyes over their work to ensure they’re complying with the latest guidance. They need HR technology that makes it easier and faster to view and process employee requests. They need the human support that makes them feel confident that if they become sick or need to leave work to care for a family member who is ill, they won’t be abandoning their employer to fall apart.

The best way to connect with that support quickly is by contacting an HR consultancy or management firm. They can step in to provide leaders and employees with the latest guidance and educational materials, provide a fresh perspective to enable best practices for human capital management, and pick up the slack on day-to-day HR tasks, empowering your core team to focus on leadership and taking the pressure off those key stakeholders to stay healthy and stay at work.

Connect with Proven Leadership Coaching

Many departmental and overall leaders in start-ups and early-stage companies skew younger. That’s part of what makes the start-up scene so vibrant and energetic. What young leaders don’t always have, however, is vast experience – and they’ve certainly never seen anything like this before.

That’s why it can be so valuable to reach out to veteran business leaders who’ve moved into consultancy. Their perspective can provide valuable emergency response management strategy, both in terms of short-term communication/leadership and planning long-term ways to emerge from this ordeal stronger and better than ever.

They say that two heads are better than one, so when it comes to tackling one of the biggest, most complex business challenges of our time, why wouldn’t you reach out to someone who has navigated an entire career of workforce challenges and complexities?

Launchways is Here to Help!

Based in Chicago, Launchways is the Midwest’s most forward-thinking provider of human resources support and employee benefits brokerage. We have 10+ years of expertise in the fields of employee benefits, business insurance, payroll, human resources, compliance, and more, and we’ve always taken great pride in the work we do both locally within the Chicago startup community.

During this time of incredible need and uncertainty, we’ve been doing what we can to keep our clients, partners, and community business allies up to date on the latest information about COVID-19 and connected with the most impactful possible pandemic management strategies. We’re pretty proud of the resources we’ve created, including…

• Our free, best-practices focused webinars for leaders seeking centralized COVID-19 resources
• Our comprehensive COVID-19 Emergency Resource Center clarifying expectations for business at this time and providing executive summaries of emerging regulatory guidance
• Our toolkit of templates for HR communication, simplifying furlough and layoff notifications
• One-on-one support with our CEO and leadership expert, Jim Taylor, who has over 15 years of HR and benefits experience (book time to chat one-on-one with Jim)

If you’re a growing or early-stage business feeling the pinch of the COVID-19 pandemic, contact Launchways today to see what we can do to strengthen your HR function and empower your leadership in difference-making ways.

Launchways partner and the most active early-stage investors in the Midwest, Hyde Park Angels, has put together a resource center specifically tailored to the needs of growth-stage businesses. Please visit their COVID-19 Resource Center here.

Executive Summary: Families First Coronavirus Response Act Clarifications from the Department of Labor

by Carolyn Kick | Mar 25, 2020 | COVID-19 Resources

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) provides expanded paid leave for employees who are sick, caring for sick family members, or supervising children whose schools or daycare facilities are closed due to COVID-19.

Since the announcement of the Act a week ago, there has been a lot of speculation about how much leave the final law would offer and to whom it would apply. Now, the Department of Labor has published clarifying guidance to help employers and employees alike understand the FFCRA.

In this post we’ll:

• Provide a general summary of employee leave requirements under the FFCRA
• Clarify when the bill goes into effect and which businesses it will affect
• Review the most important takeaways for employees & employers

If you’d like to see the full text of the DOL’s guidance materials, they can be found here:

• FFCRA Questions & Answers
• FFCRA Employer Paid Leave Requirements
• FFCRA Employee Paid Leave Rights

What does the Act say businesses need to do?

The FFCRA dictates that small and medium-sized employers (<500 U.S. employees) must provide paid sick leave for employees as needed to account for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifically, all employees are entitled to:

• Two full weeks (up to 80 hours) of paid sick leave at their regular rate if they are unable to work due to COVID-19 illness, quarantine due to exposure, or are experiencing symptoms associated with the virus and awaiting diagnosis
• Two full weeks (up to 80 hours) of paid sick leave at 2/3 their regular rate if they need to care for an individual who is subject to quarantine OR if they need to care for minors whose schools or childcare facilities are closed due to COVID-19

Furthermore, employees who have been with an employer for more than 30 days are also eligible for:

• Up to 10 additional weeks of paid extended family/medical leave at 2/3 their regular rate if they need to care for minors whose schools or childcare facilities are closed due to COVID-19

When does the new law go into effect?

April 1; one week from the publication of new guidance from the DOL.

How do I know if the new guidance affects my business?

If your business has 500 or more employees in the United States, the FFCRA does not apply to your business. Employee headcounts from different divisions or establishments within a corporation should be added together to determine whether or not the entity as a whole is exempt.

If your business has 499 or fewer employees in the United States, the leave expansions of the FFCRA apply to your business.

Independent contractors should not be included in your headcount to determine exempt status. Employees already on leave, jointly employed professionals, and temps contracted through an agency should be included.

What about for small businesses?

If you have 49 or fewer employees in the United States and the Act’s expanded leave requirements would threaten the viability of your business, you may be eligible for a small business exemption.

Further guidance on the small business exemption will be provided in the near future.

What employers need to know

What specific reasons can someone go on leave under the FFCRA?

An employee qualifies for paid sick leave (full pay) under the FFCRA if they:

• Are subject to a federal, state, or local quarantine or isolation order related to COVID-19 and cannot telework
• Have been advised by a healthcare provider to self-quarantine related to COVID-19 and cannot telework
• Are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and seeking a medical diagnosis
• Are caring for an individual subject to a federal, state, local, or doctor’s order to quarantine
• Are caring for a child whose school or source of childcare is closed/unavailable due to COVID-19
• Are experiencing any other substantially similar condition specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Secretaries of Labor and Treasury

An employee qualifies for expanded family leave (2/3 pay) if:

• They are caring for a child whose school or source of childcare is closed/unavailable due to COVID-19

What about part-time employees?

A part-time employee qualifies for paid leave equivalent to their two-week average of hours worked. If part-time employees do not work a set number of hours per week, a six-month average can be calculated for each worker.

What about minimum wage exception workers on leave?

If you have employees who qualify for the minimum wage exception (tipped positions), you must pay them 2/3 of the applicable local minimum wage times their average number of hours worked in a two-week period. If work hours are variable week-to-week, a six-month average can be calculated.

What employees need to know

If you’re reading this summary, you’re likely an HR professional or business leader, but you also have crucial employee education responsibilities during this time. You should pass FFCRA resources along to all your employees and ensure they are aware of their leave eligibility and rights.

Provide your team members with the DOL links at the top of this post to help them understand the legislative protections they have gained. It’s also crucial to be a resource to your employees and help them understand:

• How to file for family or medical leave via HR
• How much they would be paid during their leave
• When they would hypothetically return from leave
• Who to communicate with before and during their leave as well as points of contact for their return

Takeaways

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act has expanded paid leave for employees of small and medium-sized businesses to provide them the security they need to care for themselves and their families. These short-term extensions go into effect at the beginning of April and will offer needed health, safety, and economic stability for millions of Americans.

Remember:

• All employees are eligible for two weeks of paid sick time at their standard rate if they have Coronavirus, are quarantined, or are exhibiting symptoms pending a diagnosis
• All employees are eligible for two weeks of paid sick time at 2/3 their normal rate to care for a family member who is sick or under quarantine or if they are caring for a child whose school or source of childcare is closed due to COVID-19
• Employees who have been with their employer for more than 30 days are eligible for up to 10 weeks of extended family/medical leave to provide care to children whose schools or sources of childcare are closed due to COVID-19

Families First Coronavirus Response Act Flowchat

Launchways is offering a comprehensive flowchart outlining FMLA & Paid Sick Leave changes in light of the new COVID-19 legislation. Use this flowchart to ensure compliance at your business.

Here’s what’s included:

• Step-by-step flowchart for FMLA expansion
• Step-by-step flowchart for Emergency Paid Sick Leave
• List of special rules & how to apply them
• How to calculate the rate of pay for FMLA & Emergency Paid Sick Leave

DOWNLOAD THE FLOWCHART NOW >