Updating Your Business for COVID-19
*** UPDATED MARCH 17, 2020 ***
How’s your company doing with updating policies and taking action for the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic?
Your projects and operations depends on the health and wellbeing of your employees, subcontractors, and business partners.
I have moved my company’s focus since early February in helping our customers and the general business market to plan and execute new processes to stay safe in today’s crisis.
This article introduces government guidelines and and important COVID-19 CDC and WHO links.
In summary, my company invested two free and simple executable processes with action steps for accountability and governance.
Important Page Links
First of all, you can learn all about the COVID-19 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) site and the World Health Organization (WHO) pages. The following are valuable pages that will be updated over time by the source.
Bookmark this blog post as a reference page.
How to Prepare Your Business
To start with, the 6 steps below in this article are based on the CDC’s Interim Guidance for Businesses page. This CDC page is designed to help prevent workspace exposures to acute respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19, in non-healthcare settings, which means your business environment.
You can get the following list of CDC steps as a Free executable Coronavirus Employer Preparation Plan done-for-you as a task list from the new Pie Recipe Store. If you’re not a Pie customer, no problem. When you click the orange import button, it will sign you up for a free Pie account where you use the project template recipe to execute the 6 steps below.
Watch the following video to see how you can execute the CDC steps in the Pie application. Can be executed in the free Pie plan.
The following 6 step sections provide the how-to steps for employers as defined from the CDC’s site. Bookmark this blog and follow the 6 steps below, or better yet, run it like a project in Pie where you can assign accountability and monitor progress to ensure it gets done. The version in Pie provides more details than what’s listed below.
1) Initiate Preparation Plan
Start your Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) employer preparation plan with the initiate phase. Here you should consider why you’re doing this, how important it is for your employee’s health and your business viability. This first phase along with the others below are obtained from the CDC Interim Guidance for Businesses page along with a few other site pages.
Review the purpose of your COVID-19 preparation plan. Your objective should be to consider how best to decrease the spread of an impact from COVID-19 across your business.
Identify and communicate your company’s objectives, such as
reducing transmission among staff
protecting people who are at higher risk for adverse health complications
maintaining business operations
minimizing adverse affects on other entities in your supply chain
Review your preparation. There are a number of steps that you need to consider, such as
Ensure the plan is flexible
Conduct a focused discussion to look for plan gaps that need correction
Share plan with employees and explain HR policies including workplace and leave flexibilities
Share best practices with other businesses in your community and network
Identify possible work-related exposure and health risks. Check out OSHA information on how to protect workers.
Coordinate with state and local health officials. This is encouraged so that timely and accurate information can help you with your local business location or locations. Keep in mind the information for your business locations may differ according to local outbreaks.
Set up procedures for activating and terminating your response plan. You should prepare authorities, triggers, and procedures for activating your response plan. Also prepare any termination process if the risk subsides.
Prepare a clear definition of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) and communicate it clearly to your employees, contractors, and business partners that are part of your supply chain.
Establishing a communication process ready to deliver information to your employees, contractors, and business partners. Think this through to anticipate fear, anxiety, rumors, and misinformation.
2) Review Business Sustainability Risks
Your business viability and sustainability relies on your great people who make things happen. It also relies on your contractors and supply chain partners. This coronavirus preparation phase should help you think about these risks and prepare in advance to keep your people risk free and your business doors open.
Identify your essential business functions, jobs or roles, and critical elements within your supply chains that you require to maintain your business operations. Think about how your business will operate if there’s increasing absenteeism or your supply chains are interrupted.
Set up key responsible management for your different business locations. If your business operation is mostly virtual with everyone working remotely, consider identifying managers in the different regions around the country or in other countries.
Prepare for possible increase of absenteeism. This could include not only employees staying home for their own health issues and risks, but also their children who may be dismissed from school if COVID-19 concerns increase in your school district.
3) Set Up Stay-at-Home Policies
Many firms have great work flexible options, but many don’t. This is the time for every company to think about stay-at-home policy updates. The following is some guidance from the CDC coronavirus employer preparation site that can give you a jump start. More details in the free actionable Pie recipe.
Explore flexible policies and practices, such as flexible worksites (telecommuting) and flexible hours to increase physical distance among employees.
Set up stay-at-home policy for sick employees. Those who have symptoms of acute respiratory illness should be encouraged to not come to work until they are free of fever. Don’t require a healthcare provider’s note to validate their illness since providers may be overwhelmed with appointments. Include flexible policies that permit your employers to stay at home to care for sick family members.
Update sick leave polices so they are flexible and consistent with public health guidance. Ensure your employees are away of these policies.
Include stay-at-home requirements with contractors and partners. Talk with them about the importance for them to develop non-punitive leave policies.
Post up your policy changes and make them accessible for your employees. Send the updates via company-wide notices, internal site pages, and other means. Train your HR group to handle immediate questions and concerns when people receive these notices.
4) Set Up On Site Health Action Policies
Your on-site coronavirus preparation policies should be planned and ready for on-the-ground-floor execution. This phase talks about identifying risks and keeping the area clean to prevent the spreading of any contagions.
Identify employees who appear to have symptoms. CDC recommends to identify those who appear to have acute respiratory illness symptoms upon arrival to work or become sick during the day.
Symptoms can include:Fever
Cough
Shortness of breath
Separate sick employees from the group. Send them home immediately!
Set up coughing and sneezing etiquette. This involves the practices that prevent the spread of the disease. A critical time to practice good hygiene etiquette is when you are sick, especially when coughing or sneezing. Import the free Pie Coronavirus Employer Preparation Plan recipe to see details about how the illness is spread, how to help stop the spread of germs, and other tips.
Provide tissues and no-touch garbage cans.
Hang up health posters. I included attached poster files from the CDC site in the Pie recipe.
Provide hand rubs and encourage frequent hand washing.
Advise healthy employees who have sick family members to notify their supervisor.
Inform employees if an employee is confirmed to have COVID-19 infection.
5) Set Up Travel Notices
Do your employees or contractors travel? Sometimes it is truly necessary, so if they need to, ensure they’re given the best protection policies you can provide. If they don’t need to travel, encourage remote conferencing with tools like GoToMeeting, Whereby, or WebEx.
Check out the most recent CDC’s traveler’s health notices.
Consider a travel ban if a U.S. outbreak. Cancel non-essential business travel to other countries identified by CDC as risk countries.
Review and circulate the CDC Travel Planner guide.
Advise employees to check themselves for symptoms before traveling.
Advice employees to contact their supervisor if they become sick while traveling.
If outside of country, employees should follow your company policies for obtaining medical care, how to contact a healthcare provider, or how to obtain services from an overseas medical assistance company.
6) Perform Routine Environmental Cleaning
Sometimes it’s impossible to know if anyone is infected with a spreadable illness, such as the COVID-19. Therefore, ongoing environmental cleaning and disinfecting is a good way to reduce risks whether or not there are physical signs of a disease in the workplace.
Clean all frequently touched surfaces such as workstations, countertops, and doorknobs.
Provide disposable wipes for employees so that commonly used surfaces can be wiped down by the employee before and after each use.
The above should get you started with a Coronavirus preparation plan for your business. There are number of resources starting to popup on the web. I would recommend you keep tabs on the CDC website for the most up to date and accurate information.
In summary, you can execute the above 6 activities in the free Pie preparation plan that contains more how-to details. Click here to get to the recipe page and then click on the orange import button to import. It will sign you up for a free Pie account at the same time if you’re not a member. Then you can turn this recipe into an actionable project.
Stay safe!
Paul
Written by Paul Dandurand, Pie CEO & Founder