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.
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) launched last month, temporarily expanding paid sick and FMLA leave for employees of businesses with headcounts of fewer than 500 as part of the national COVID-19 response. The follow-up CARES Act provided payroll tax credits for employers to offset the cost and impact of the leave expansion.
The quick but piecemeal rollout of legislation has created some confusion as to how employees should declare their eligibility/need for leave and what documentation trail needs to exist to ensure employers are eligible for tax credits.
In this post we’ll cover:
What conditions or situations justify paid leave under the FFCRA
What documentation employees should submit as part of an application for leave
What documentation employers need to maintain to qualify for tax credits
Clarifying Who is FFCRA Leave Expansion Eligible
The FFCRA establishes three specific situations in which an employee working for a business with 499 or fewer employees qualifies for two weeks of paid sick leave at their regular rate, up to $5,110:
If the employee is subject to a federal, state, or local quarantine or isolation order
If the employee has been advised by a healthcare provider to self-quarantine
If the employee is experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19 and seeking a medical diagnosis
The act also establishes three other scenarios in which an employee working for a business with 499 or fewer employees qualifies for two weeks of paid sick leave at two-thirds (2/3) their regular rate, up to $2,000:
If an employee is caring for an individual subject to a quarantine or isolation order
If an employee is experiencing any substantially similar condition identified by the HHS
If an employee is caring for a child whose school or daycare is closed or unavailable due to COVID-19
Finally, the act also provides extended family leave for situations in which schools or childcare facilities remain closed beyond the two weeks of leave above. During that 10-week period, employees earn two-thirds (2/3) their regular rate, up to $10,000 (in addition to the $2,000 from their two initial weeks of leave).
Documentation Requirements for Employees Requesting Leave
The DOL did not codify any single approach to transitioning employees toward COVID-19 leave, instead saying that employees should file their request as soon as possible and follow reasonable documentation procedures as soon as practical. Here are the specific pieces of information/documentation the DOL stipulates employees must provide:
In their signed request for leave, employees must provide:
Their full legal name (as it appears on IRS records)
Their qualifying reason for leave (from the above list)
A clear statement that their illness or responsibilities prevent them from working from home during this time
Their anticipated date for return
If the employee is requesting leave due to a quarantine order, they must also provide:
The name of the government entity who issued the order
If an employee is requesting leave because a healthcare provider has instructed them to, they must also provide:
The name of the healthcare provider
If an employee is requesting leave to care for a child without school or daycare, they must provide:
The child’s full legal name as it appears on school rosters
The name of the school, childcare facility, or provider who is closed or unable to provide care due to COVID-19
A clear statement that they are the only option to provide care for this child at this time
As long as you’re requiring, collecting, and maintaining the above documentation, you and your employees are compliant in the eyes of the DOL.
What About a Doctor’s Note?
Generally speaking, a doctor’s note is the gold standard for medical leave and should be provided in COVID-19-related ADA accommodation requests. However, the DOL is not requiring one as part of their leave documentation procedure, in part because the strain of the pandemic is putting on the medical community.
That means if an employee believes they have COVID-19 or needs to care for someone who does, waiting to get a doctor’s note could actually put more of your employees at risk. That’s why the best guidance for now is to keep your application protocol relatively straightforward and stick to the DOL’s documentation requirements.
Documentation Requirements for Tax Credits
While the DOL’s documentation requirements are crucial to executing the FFCRA correctly, the IRS’ documentation requirements are equally important to getting the payroll tax credits available to help your business weather this storm.
In order to maintain eligibility for your tax credits, you must maintain:
Any other documentation related to filing for credits with the IRS
Documentation of how you calculated FMLA/sick leave pay for employees
Documentation of how you determined the amount of qualified health plan expenses that you allocated to wages
In terms of documentation from your employees, the IRS’ requirements are extremely similar to the DOL’s, but there are a few key differences, specifically involving childcare scenarios.
The IRS requires documentation of the following information for employees requesting leave under the FFCRA to care for a child or children whose school(s) or place(s) of childcare are closed due to COVID-19:
The full name of each child as they appear on school rosters
The name of the school, childcare facility, or provider no longer able to provide childcare due to COVID-19
A clear statement that they are the only option to provide care for this child at this time
In the case of a child over 14 who would only be alone during daylight hours, employees should provide a statement explaining the special circumstances that require childcare
Takeaways
The goal of the FFCRA is to protect individuals and families across America during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CARES Act backs up the FFCRA by providing businesses with the tax credits they need to make the considerable leave expansion feasible. Getting those credits requires documentation of the right information, however.
Remember:
There is no official leave documentation process for the DOL, but they do require a few specific pieces of information
The IRS has slightly stricter requirements for documentation of childcare-related leave
IRS forms 7200 and 941 are essential to receiving your tax credits
Be ready to explain how you calculated wages for employees on leave and determined your health plan expenses
The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), IRS, and Department of the Treasury issued a joint announcement on April 28th stating that they are extending a variety of timeframes related to employer sponsored healthcare coverage, portability, and continuation under COBRA.
Generally speaking, these extensions are designed to maximize healthcare accessibility during the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, continue coverage for as many Americans as possible, and loosen up claims negotiating windows in a way that prevents a processing bottleneck from weakening the system as a whole.
In this post we’ll explore:
Extensions of employee healthcare deadlines under ERISA Section 518
A few examples of what the extensions mean for employers
The meaning of the HHS “measured enforcement period”
ERISA Section 518 Relief
Section 518 of ERISA allows for the extension of certain benefits-related filing and documentation deadlines by up to one year in the event of a presidentially declared national emergency.
With this week’s joint announcement, the government has declared that all employee health plans, disability plans and other employee welfare plans must disregard the period from March 1, 2020 until sixty (60) days after the announced end of the COVID-19 national emergency (“the Outbreak Period”) when determining the following periods and dates:
The 30-day special enrollment periods for employees
The 60-day COBRA benefit continuation election
Dates for making COBRA premium payments
The date for individuals to notify the provider of a qualifying event or determination of disability
The date range within which individuals can file benefit claims
The date by which claimants must file an appeal for an adverse determination
The date range within which individuals can request an external review of an adverse determination
The date range within which individuals may file information to perfect an external review of an adverse determination
For employers, this means that your plan administrator can’t count dates occurring during the Outbreak Period against employee deadlines. The spirit of these extensions is extremely employee-friendly, but it’s also HR and administrator-friendly, as it significantly reduces the pressure to process claims and push laid off or furloughed employees through off-boarding as quickly as possible.
To see the full text of the joint announcement’s final rule, click here.
What Will This Look Like in Action?
Open-Enrollment Examples
If an employee has a baby during the Outbreak Period, the child can be brought onto employee healthcare via special enrollment until 30 days after the Outbreak Period ends (90 total days after the announced end of the national emergency).
Similarly, if an employee got married shortly before or during the Outbreak Period, the new spouse’s special enrollment period will last until 30 days after the Outbreak Period ends (90 days total after the announced end of the national emergency).
COBRA Election Example
If an employee has been furloughed to the point where they no longer work enough hours to qualify for employer-sponsored coverage due to the national emergency, their COBRA election period must remain open until 60 days after the Outbreak Period ends (120 total days after the announced end of the national emergency).
COBRA Premium Payments Example
If an employee was receiving COBRA coverage at the beginning of the Outbreak Period, premium payments for COBRA coverage during the Outbreak Period will be considered timely if the payments are made within 30 days of the end of the Outbreak Period (90 days total after the announced end of the national emergency). As long as premiums for all months during the Outbreak Period are paid in a timely manner, the employee is eligible to continue coverage.
Claim Filing Example
If an employee has a 365-day filing window for any claim, that window will not begin for any claims made during the Outbreak Period until the Outbreak Period ends. Similarly, the entire date range of the Outbreak Period should be excluded from claims deadline calculations for care that occurred shortly before the national emergency.
The “Measured Enforcement” Period
The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) officially concurs with the relief announced by EBSA in the joint statement and is relaxing enforcement for public healthcare, while encouraging states to adopt the spirit of the extensions EBSA is creating for private employer-sponsored programs.
No official end date has been announced for this period.
Takeaways
EBSA’s COVID-19 employee benefits deadline extensions are designed to help as many Americans as possible maintain their access to employer-sponsored healthcare during the coronavirus outbreak. While they’re largely employee-friendly, the extensions also help HR departments and benefits administrators reduce the bottleneck that COVID-19 has created.
Remember:
The “Outbreak Period” is defined as March 1, 2020 until 60 days after the COVID-19 national emergency is declared over.
Dates falling within the Outbreak Period should not be counted against employees for:
