Business Preparedness for COVID-19

Creating a Plan for Employees and Business Operations

Considerations for Creating a Plan for Employees:

• Determine your priorities and the minimum staffing requirements to support these priorities in case you need to function with a significantly reduced workforce.
• Identify key employees and ensure other staff members receive appropriate training to cover their absence comprehensively.
• Ensure employees can effectively work from home.
• Verify that you have the tools, technology, capacity and security measures in place to support a large remote workforce.
• Review your HR policies to ensure employees will not be personally impacted if they must be quarantined for an extended period and modify any policies as appropriate to provide further flexibility to normal working arrangements.
• Share your plan with employees and explain what human resources policies, workplace and leave flexibilities, pay and benefits will be available to them.

Considerations for Creating a Plan for Business Operations:

• Map your dependencies to understand where disruptions might impact your value chains.
• Review the preparedness of your critical third parties: suppliers, vendors and service providers.
• Identify single points of failure in your ecosystem.
• Conduct a focused discussion or exercise using your plan to determine whether the plan has gaps or problems that need to be corrected.

Recommended Strategies for Employers to Use Now:

• Emphasize employees use respiratory etiquette, hand hygiene and stay home when sick.
• Provide soap and alcohol-based hand rubs in the workplace. Ensure adequate supplies are maintained. Place hand rubs in multiple locations to encourage hand hygiene.
• Routinely clean all frequently touched surfaces, such as workstations, countertops, and doorknobs.
• Advise employees before traveling.
• Consider alternate options to travel and precautions should they travel.

At Thriveon, our Chief Information Officers are discussing the above with each client to ensure their IT systems will meet their business needs during the pandemic. Schedule a call, and we can do the same for you.