What To Do If An Employee Has COVID-19

1. NOTIFY EMPLOYEES

If you have other employees who may have been exposed, you should notify them of the possible exposure immediately. By letting them know that an employee has been diagnosed they can gauge their own risk.

Remember that medical information must be kept confidential per the ADA, so it’s important not to disclose which employee was diagnosed. If your employees figure it out on their own that is ok, but make sure you are not the one to divulge that information.

Per the CDC, by following the Public Health Recommendations for Community-Related Exposure, most workplaces should instruct potentially exposed employees to stay home for 14 days, telework if possible, and self-monitor for symptoms.

2. CLEAN & QUARANTINE

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, follow the CDC guidelines and your local health department recommendations on cleaning and possible quarantining. For 24 hours (or as long as possible) you should close areas where the infected employee visited or worked and follow up with a thorough cleaning and disinfecting.

3. Returning to Work

The employee who was diagnosed should work closely with their healthcare provider to determine when it’s safe for them to return to work.

For those that did not get tested but it is presumed they have COVID, they will probably be allowed to return to work when:

At least 24 hours have passed since recovery, defined as resolution of fever without the use of fever-reducing medications and improvement in respiratory symptoms and,
At least 10 days have passed since symptoms first appeared.

4. maintain Healthy business operations

COVID-19 has the potential to impact your business operations immensely. Designating a point person to handle all COVID-related issues can help minimize the impact.

Other things to keep in mind:

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA or Act) requires certain employersexternal icon to provide their employees with paid sick leave or expanded family and medical leave for specified reasons related to COVID-19.

Employers with fewer than 500 employees are eligible for 100% tax creditsexternal icon for Families First Coronavirus Response Act COVID-19 paid leave provided through December 31, 2020, up to certain limits.

Amber E.

HR Manager

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10 Reasons Why Successful Companies Use an Employee Handbook Builder

1. time is essential

Coorporate will tell you anyone in HR will have a job description a mile long. HR positions can closely relate to therapists, employment lawyers, compliance experts, accountants, and let’s be honest, daycare providers.

Just kidding. Sort of.

One thing is certain, time is not their friend. With so many projects and issues to handle every day, anything that can be streamlined should be streamlined. Every company worth it’s weight has a handbook, and when HR has to create a handbook, or update a seriously out of date one, using an Employee Handbook Builder instead of a template saves days of work. It also keeps everything digital for faster updating and reference.

2. Automatic Compliance Updates

Keeping your handbook in compliance means editing your company handbook every time an employment law changes on a Federal, State, local or industry level. That’s a lot for your office manager or HR Person to keep up with. Depending on your location in the U.S, they could be looking at 2-20 changes every month. Depending on the handbook builder, these edits could go from hours of responsibility to an electronic system keep up with it for them.

(Not all builders are built the same, please ask about this feature or a free trial before purchasing.)

3. Editing is a breeze

In this digital age, keeping a handbook in an editable file is as simple as using Word. But Word won’t tell you when a policy is no longer compliant. This handbook builder will though.

4. Policy Creation

No one relishes the day they have to create and implement new HR policies. Most of those in HR dread them. Researching, formatting and writing and possibly running it past the company lawyer for a sizable cost, can all be a headache. Not to mention implementing into company culture, obtaining employees signatures, and answering everyones questions.

Can you imagine your handbook writing these instead? Just a simple search and there’s an ERISA-Attorney approved policy to customize. It can’t chase down Warehouse John and make him sign it, but it can make the policy creation itself much more pleasant.

Your company may or may not have yet implemented a policy against creating employee nicknames.

5. Electronic Signatures

So I lied. Some handbook builders do come with extra features, like electronic signatures, so it does actually chase down Warehouse John… digitally. If he hasn’t signed it, your office manager can just keep hitting send until he gives in and complies. Which makes compliance much easier on everyone.

This feature may not be available for all builders, or may incur an additional cost.

6. recordkeeping

“Is our handbook up to date? Who updated it and when was the last update? What was updated? Was everyone notified?”

Imagine a dashboard that keeps pristine records of every update without effort.

7. Environmentally Friendly

Besides being HR Person friendly, having your handbook accessible digitally is environmentally friendly. And who isn’t on board with that?

8. Makes Compliance Easy

All of a sudden, your handbook becomes its own compliance expert hands-free. A good employee handbook builder will help you build your handbook. A great handbook builder will update itself. And the latter can sometimes even cost less. Besides featuring automatic compliance updates, this particular handbook builder will alert your staff when policies are out of compliance. A few clicks is all it takes to get your handbook back in shape again. Sure beats paying for hours and hours for your HR person to research and update manually.

9. Multistate Options

For companies with multiple state locations, compliance can prove incredibly difficult. Great handbook builders come with additional features, such as multi-state compliance options. I’ve had to use this feature for a few clients, and I’ll break down how easy this makes it by outlining the extra steps your HR Person will need to take.

Additional step one: Add the extra states.

That’s it.

This handbook builder finds the necessary compliance for each state based on the number of employees present, city locations, industry and a few other specifications. They create one handbook, it breaks it into the number of states you’ve selected. Streamlined.

(This feature may not be available for all builders, or may incur an extra cost.)

10. Cost

If you’ve read this far, you are most likely really curious about what handbook builders cost companies. We’ve seen some HR companies sell just a simple handbook template for $50-$200.

And many in HR will pay that not knowing there’s a better way.

The Employee Handbook Builder I referenced in the posts above, costs only $225 a year. That’s less than the two workdays it would take your staff to create one from scratch. I was skeptical, too. You can book a quick appointment to see how it works or check out a video tutorial.

Better yet, for $99 a month a self-updating handbook could be the icing on the cake. Check out how you can get employee training, a Professional HR Team and much more free for two full weeks.

If you decide you’d rather have them begin from scratch and spend days on a tedious project, at least take this handbook template free.

Would you like to take a peek at 8 other tools all companies should know exist?