COVID-19 Balancing Act
What if you can’t adjust workloads, deliver services online, focus on new projects or reduce your remote employees’ hours?
My nonprofit provides essential services in the community. I have several staff members who are at high risk of severe infection from COVID-19. I want to keep them safe, but how do I make sure they have enough to do when they're working remotely?
~Concerned in Chicago
Dear Concerned,
Kudos to you for focusing on your team’s safety and welfare and for being committed to helping everyone stay healthy. Your challenge is to balance the needs of your more vulnerable staff with those of the entire team and organization as whole, while keeping all of your staff executing as efficiently and effectively as possible in the current environment.
Some thoughts on how to insure that your at-home employees have enough to do:
Can you reconfigure your team’s workload? Take a step back and look at everything your organization needs to accomplish. Rather than thinking in terms of job descriptions and positions on the org chart, consider which of this work can be done remotely and whether your employees with health restrictions could produce it. For example, if one of your program managers can’t be in the clinic working directly with clients, can she write grant proposals from home instead?
Is there a way for remote staff to use technology to deliver services? For example, can one of your senior intake specialists meet with new clients over Zoom instead of face-to-face?
If your staff work in teams, could the at-home employee prepare the lesson plan or training program for another team member to deliver in person?
Are there any projects you haven’t had time or bandwidth to work on that will create future value or new revenue streams for your organization? Can you give one of them to your remote employees to work on?
Can you reduce your remote employees’ hours temporarily to reflect the amount of work they’re able to do from home? In other words, could they (and would they) work ¾ time or part-time until they can safely return to the office or the field?
But what if you can’t adjust workloads, deliver services online, focus on new projects or reduce your remote employees’ hours? The above suggestions assume that you have enough resources to maintain your current staffing level. If you don’t, you’ll have to make some hard choices about whether you can afford to retain employees who can’t produce the work they were hired to do. They might bring knowledge, skills or experience that would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace. But if you retain one of them at the expense of another staff member who has no restrictions or continue paying them a full-time salary for part-time work, you could well do significant long-term damage to your team’s morale and productivity.
Whatever choice you decide to make, you would be wise to consult with a human resources specialist or labor law attorney as the federal and state laws and rules and regulations about paid time off, leave, unemployment and worker’s compensation have changed, and you need to be sure you’re not going to be violating any of them.
Margo