Corona Virus: The Employer, Employee and Business Guide to COVID-19

Duration: 90 Minutes

Faculty: Teri Morning Level: Intermediate Course Id: 1055

Overview:

Every day employers and employees are both worried about the emerging Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19.) Few states are not affected and even unaffected states are expected to have cases. The takeaway is employers know if not today, then perhaps tomorrow, they will be dealing with serious illness that in some capacity will affect their business, customers and employees.

COVID-19 is a new disease. It’s hard for employers (or anyone) to know what to do or what they are expected to do as the situation changes daily. State law may affect an employer’s obligations. However even in currently unaffected states, employees expect employers to do what they can to keep them safe and be able to answer “what if.” Employees may even be expected to answer customer concerns.

With all types of risk assessment and emergency planning the best first line of defense is elimination of hazard. The second most effective way of eliminating risk is substitution, meaning to substitute the source of the hazard by something else. Such as a pharmacy could substitute waiting on customers in person by better utilizing drive-up windows, providing a way to put social distance and physical barriers between customers and employees.

There are also many other questions to be considered, such as what are an employer’s compliance obligations, and how leave, benefit and sick policies apply and if they should be temporarily changed and how. There’s also the very real pragmatic problem of returning to what will likely be a “new normal” in the workplace. For example, how do you get people who discovered in an emergency that they preferred working remotely to go back to their jobs in a workplace they’ve decided they’d prefer not to.

Why should you Attend:

Every day people are getting more and more worried. COVID-19 is a serious illness and as such it’s also becoming a serious economic issue for small business.

People differ in their own personal approaches to the disease. Some employees even in currently unaffected states are choosing to wear masks and gloves to work while at the same time their coworkers are taking advantage of cheap flights to their dream destination. It’s time to map out your own particular plan to deal with this emerging issue. No employer wants to fail their employees and no business wants to be known as the first in their state for an outbreak of a new disease.

Areas Covered in the Session:

How OSHA obligations apply
Does the ADA apply and in what respects
How FMLA applies to absences for employees and family members.
Wage and hour considerations
Applying safety protocols and systems to your workplace to minimize or eliminate exposure to current health hazards
Using engineering and administrative controls to make safer, jobs that have high people contact
The basics of a work at home program, even if its temporary
Using remote work considerations from inside an office to use social distancing to lower risk
Strengthening relaxing sick leave programs parameters on a temporary basis
Relaxing sick leave discipline parameters on a temporary basis
Can you make a sick employee go home and stay home?
Increasing sick leave program policies and/or benefits on a temporary basis
Return to work considerations
What to do with employees who have to travel
Making good hygiene part of your group norms
Who pays the bills? How less robust insurance plans put employees and customers at risk. What can an employer do?
Getting back to a new normal