Poll: Personal Coronavirus Permanent Impact

[steve-in-kville]

As mentioned, I'm curious to see how this is handled. If an employee is new, they might not have any vacation time to use. What happens then? I'm sure HR is gonna have a field day with this

[Josh]

All employers are saying that if people are sick they should not come to work. The challenge at the moment is how to handle that leave. How many exceptions to normal policies can you afford to make? Do you utilize accrued vacation time for that leave? Etc.

An employer needs to do whatever they can to make employees motivated not to come to work when sick.

Wal-Mart has instituted that for the next 2 months calling in sick will not affect your record of attendance.

[mike]

Our work place is telling people to stay at home if they are sick.

In a food business in our state, employees are never supposed to come to work if they have certain illnesses or symptoms:

A food employee is required to report to the person in charge health information related to illnesses caused by:

Norovirus
Hepatitis A virus
Shigella spp.
Shiga toxin producing E. Coli
Salmonella Typhi
nontyphoidal Salmonella

Additionally, they must report the following symptoms:

vomiting
diarrhea
jaundice
sore throat with fever
lesion that is open or draining on the hand or arms if it cannot be safely covered
Once reported, it is up to the manager/person in charge to take action to exclude or restrict the employee from working with or around food and follow proper protocol for reporting specific illnesses and symptoms.

So, nothing really unusual in how we would handle a sick employee at this point.

[Josh]

Some things employers can do:

1. Institute a sick leave policy and give employees a sick leave balance to start off with.

2. If you need on site employees, start hiring now so you can maintain adequate staffing levels if half your staff calls off.

3. Clear and concise communication to employees and management that records of call offs will not affect people’s careers for a window of time. (1-2 months from present, retroactively to February, should be sufficient.)

4. Make it clear employees will not have their vacation time affected by being off sick.

5. If you don’t provide health coverage, provide resources to get employees connected to Medicare or ACA marketplace plans. Strongly consider getting a health plan. (Why don’t you have one? The ACA requires it.) If you’re Anabaptist and use a health sharing ministry, ensure all employees are part of a plan or ministry, and consider offering support to employees who can’t afford their out of pocket costs.

6. Comply with Presidential orders, governor’s orders, and local government orders.

7. Institute as much work from home as possible. Some employees simply cannot do this. But for ones who can, make it mandatory.

[mike]

The ACA does not require businesses with under 50 employees to have a health plan.

[Josh]

The ACA does not require businesses with under 50 employees to have a health plan.

Smart move right now, saving money on health plans so that low income employees can’t afford any health care...

[appleman2006]

Yes that is our policy as well. The Memo that was sent out to our employees was really just overemphazising that as well as giving warnings that you will need to stay home if you have recently travelled to certain places in the world.

[Josh]

Yes that is our policy as well. The Memo that was sent out to our employees was really just overemphazising that as well as giving warnings that you will need to stay home if you have recently travelled to certain places in the world.

This is good advice, and one I am sorry to say some plain people are not following. A lot of plain teachers just got back from spring break, and a lot more are running around the world going to various mission outposts or on vacations.

Recently (yesterday) I saw a WhatsApp status that said:

“In case you were wondering we did see ppl in the city wearing those ugly ‘coronavirus safety masks’ (emoji) (hand over face laughing emoji) (laughing so hard I’m crying emoji)’.”

The one before it was a picture of a group of young people taking a pleasure visit to NYC... yesterday.

If you’re in Myerstown/Lebanon County, you may want to practice “social distancing” from certain plain people.

[MaxPC]

Our work place is telling people to stay at home if they are sick. And our government is saying they will be covered under our employment insurance plan immediately on the first day they stay home. But there are things that are not yet clear. To be covered under EI you need a doctors certificate and doctors are only saying to come in if you are a severe at risk case. I see a lot of potential for chaos. I know that our ability to service our customers will dry up really fast if employees do not show and so the domino chain continues.
Being involved in trying to decide what is the best thing to do for just our employees and customers gives me a greater appreciation for what our government officials are facing right now.
It would be lovely to be able to tell employees to work from home but there are hundreds of industries where that is not even a remote possibility. pun intended.

I see a lot of potential for chaos also.
And abuse too.

[appleman2006]

As mentioned, I'm curious to see how this is handled. If an employee is new, they might not have any vacation time to use. What happens then? I'm sure HR is gonna have a field day with this

I would describe what I expect HR to go through in the next little while as a nightmare.
And Josh's idea of hiring extra people to cover possible worker shortages just makes me smile. I sit on the board of an organization that represents food processing companies across the country here in Canada and there are holes in most of their production lines at the best of times. Finding good employees takes a lot more than just turning a tap on. Most will try and fill the gaps with temps if they can because you really cannot hire good workers when you cannot at least give them some confidence that there is a long term position available.