Bringing Your Team Back to the Workplace
New York City is one week into its reopening for businesses in Phase 1 industries and one week away from Phase 2 reopening. If your business has reopened or is planning to reopen in the coming weeks, you should carefully consider the following to ensure that you are providing a safe, supportive and productive environment for your employees, suppliers and customers.
Legal Compliance
The top priority for any business is to ensure that it is complying with all federal, state, and local requirements for reopening their business. New York State has provided comprehensive guidelines for industries in each phase of reopening. Continuing to monitor the federal, state, and local resources to understand what is allowed will be critical to making sure that you are aware what you should be doing as you reopen and operate your business.
Besides the New York State guidelines, which have been issued to help small businesses manage reopening process, business owners with employees will want to make sure they are complying with any Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements when implementing certain screening measures. These include measures such as on-site COVID testing, self-certification questionnaires or temperature screenings.
When returning employees to work, be aware of implementing any practices that may appear discriminatory. While you may want to be considerate of those employees who you believe are at a “high risk”, such as employees over 50 or pregnant people, it is important that you do not assume. Instead be prepared to address requests on a case by case basis allowing the employee to inform you if they believe themselves to be susceptible to the virus due to underlying health concerns.
Additionally, business owners will need to be prepared to address any other accommodations that might be required in the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Individuals may have trouble with face coverings due to disability or because of their religion.
Employee Management
Once you have determined that you are able to reopen within the guidelines issued by federal, state, and local agencies, you must decide on the best approach to reopening. SCORE provides this handy checklist outlining many of steps to take when reopening your small business.
Staffing Levels
In addition to the areas identified on this checklist, business must understand how much staff will be needed to resume effective operations. Some businesses may be able to reopen immediately at similar staffing levels prior to COVID-related closures, for others reopening may be phased. Regardless of the category your business falls into, ensuring that you have the right amount staff to operate is critical. Should your business need additional staff, the current high unemployment rates present a unique opportunity to hire and onboard additional talent, quickly.
Communication
Be prepared to communicate clearly and consistently any new procedures that employees will need to follow as your business reopens. Even though there is a feeling that things are returning to normal, there is still plenty of uncertainty. Employees will have lots of questions and concerns about their safety, their health, job security or childcare concerns. Be prepared to answer these questions and more. Additionally, plan to proactively address the needs of your employees along your operational plans.
Flexible Working Arrangements
Depending on your industry, you may have some employees who will continue to work remotely for the foreseeable future. Further, your planned approach to reopening may require that you implement flexible working arrangements to some of your staff. These types of arrangements include inventive scheduling, job sharing, staggered shifts, as well as alternating workdays or working weeks. Any or all of these arrangements present you, the business owner, with the opportunity to evolve your operations while taking your employees’ needs into consideration.
Sick Time & Other Leaves
As employees return to the workplace, the need for time off related to illness will be an ongoing concern. Business owners will want to review their current time off and leave policies or create new guidance on how time off for both COVID and non-COVID-related illnesses will be managed and paid. In addition, as you start to reopen, you may want to communicate with employees their eligibility for various city, state and federally mandated sick time or expanded leaves (such as the Emergency Family Medical Leave Expansion Act). Finally, make sure that employee sick leave balances are up to date and that you have a system in place for properly calculating and tracking leaves or sick time.
Looking Ahead
As you look to ahead to resuming business operations, remember that as much as you may want a return to business as usual, your business, your operations and your employees will look different. Employees will be nervous, uncertain, on high alert and in need of support in new and unusual ways. It is important that they are not dissuaded from raising issues but that they be assured that you are taking steps to protect your workplace. Proactively addressing potential concerns will reduce some of the stress and anxiety associated with employees returning to work.
For a deeper discussion about this topic, join us for an interactive webinar “Considerations For Returning Your Team to the Workplace” on Thursday, June 18th at 1:00 pm
