COVID-19 Back-to-Work Effort
Background
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our clients have approached us with questions about how they can bring their people back to the office as safely as possible; and, how they can adequately support employees who are working remotely.
The Problem
Our clients must strike a balance, supporting the health and wellbeing of their employees while also maintaining operational efficiency. Compounding these issues is the need for full compliance with current state and municipal guidelines.
Our Approach
When businesses approach us with COVID-19 concerns, our first response is to ask three simple questions:
- What worked for your business before the pandemic?
- What’s not working now?
- What are your ultimate goals? What do you want to happen?
In considering this paradigm, we have conducted employee surveys on behalf of multiple clients, developing a clearer understanding of the issues employees are dealing with. We have gathered information about employee mental health; their adjustment to working remotely; obstacles they face (e.g., having to homeschool their kids); and problems they have had performing their normal tasks (e.g., lack of access to reports or data).
What we have found in these surveys is that employees articulate two big issues: Isolation, and fear that they might get sick.
Spectrum HR Solutions has responded to this by conducting job surveys for multiple clients, helping them to assess the roles and the employees who remain as productive as ever, even while working remotely. This has provided employers with a way to make data-driven decisions about which roles should or shouldn’t be called back to the workplace.
We have helped clients adopt the phased reopening guidelines of their municipalities, including quarantine periods between each phase.
We have helped our clients articulate clear guidelines for maintaining workplace safety and sanitization and counseled them on having employees sign off on these guidelines before coming back to work.
We have helped our clients implement appropriate workplace sanitization standards, encompassing masks, gloves, cleaning sprays, thermometers, etc.
And, we have educated employees on what to do if they become ill, including their responsibilities to report their symptoms.
The Results
Through these efforts, we have helped many companies enact safe back-to-work protocols, allowing them to maintain as much operational “normalcy” as possible without any of their team members becoming sick. We are pleased to provide ongoing HR support for businesses throughout this unprecedented season.