03/18/2020
How’s everyone doing? This is a rough time for all of us with businesses, but I wanted to reach out and tell you how proud all of us on the People People team are of the leadership shown in the past couple of weeks (as always, but especially during this crisis). Like many of you, our folks are now 100% remote – and working every day to continue to serve you. This is a rough time for businesses in general, and we’re here and ready to help you manage through this. Our office phones forward to our cell phones, we have highly secure, remote access to all of our documents and our email, we’re videoconferencing any meetings, and for those of you with payrolls, we have full access and are going a step further and are in the process of training others to do those payrolls in case one of us becomes sick – let’s hope not - we’ve got you covered. Our cell numbers are all on our website. If you’re in a pickle or want to troubleshoot/bounce ideas/just need someone to talk to, you can call any one of us for help. peoplepeopleus.com
One of the big things we thought we’d share are the new best practices we’re seeing in the businesses we serve – we’re collaborating with our clients to come up with new creative ways to manage their workforce remotely or reduce the potential of laying off your most valuable assets – your people. As these bright ideas happen, we plan to share with you – without naming the client in question of course - in hopes that one of the solutions or ideas might work for you too. We’re all in this together, and together we’re a force to be reckoned with. Will update you with new bright ideas, and other news as it becomes available. We’ve got a ton more so expect to share those too. If you’ve come up with bright ideas that we can share, let us know and we’ll gladly do so as well.
Bright Ideas From Our Clients
Keeping Communication Lines Open During Work from Home
For those of you – like us – that have gone to remote work, communication and engagement is really important. Scheduling touch bases or company meetings can be done via phone conference or video conference. If you don’t have either set up, we recommend freeconferencecall.com (yes, it’s free) and zoom.com which carries a small monthly charge of $14.99 per host. You don’t have to sign everyone in the company up for Zoom – just those that might want to host a meeting. It’s pretty simple to use and we haven’t run into too many connection issues at all. Even if your folks don’t have access to a web cam, they can join by phone.
Staggering Hours
Some positions simply can’t be done at home and require employees to be at work. We’ve worked out staggered schedules to improve social distancing, and this is working for a lot of two-working parent households who could work different shifts and still cover taking care of the kids since schools are closed. We just need to remind everyone that good hygiene and not presenting for work is required if you aren’t feeling well – for any reason - along with the myriad of other best practices that the CDC recommends that can be found here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/share-facts.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fabout%2Fshare-facts.html
HR 6201 – Families First Coronavirus Response Act
The Families First Coronavirus Response Act passed in congress over the last weekend and was literally just passed by the Senate in a bi-partisan vote. Belinda was on a video conference today with Congresswoman Sharice Davids who promised to keep us posted of further significant changes. We haven’t had a chance to analyze all the differences from the original Act sent to the Senate, but will fill you in as more information becomes available. There’s a quick summary here – and for many of you that haven’t had to work with FMLA before you may need to now. https://www.fisherphillips.com/resources-alerts-congress-finalizes-covid-19-coronavirus-response-act?click_source=sitepilot06!6170!amFuZXR0ZUBwZW9wbGVwZW9wbGV1cy5jb20=
Good News on the Web
Before you think there’s no good news on the coronavirus, let’s see if we can lift some spirits with 10 positives from this mess: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/10-positive-updates-on-the-covid-19-outbreaks-from-around-the-world/
Stay healthy - we’re truly all in this together, we’re constantly thinking of you and ask you to call us whenever you need us!
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a virus (more specifically, a coronavirus) identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China.
