As of late August, there were over 90,000 COVID patients in hospitals around the country. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way companies handle sick employees.
If you want to know some tips for navigating this new terrain and promoting wellness in your workplace, you’ll want to check out this guide. Keep reading to learn tips you can put into practice today.
1. Offer Flexibility
Many employees continue working while sick to avoid being penalized or losing valuable income. You can avoid exposing healthy employees to sick ones by being a more flexible workplace.
This means creating a workplace that can accommodate different work styles. You can offer some of your employees the opportunity to work from home. They can use video conferencing and other technology to connect with their team.
If you do keep some of your team working from the office, rearrange the office to create a safe distance between employees.
2. Offer Sick Leave
Sick-leave practices are vital for a company that cares about its employees. These practices will help control the spread of illness among employees in the workplace.
Sick leave is also a way to encourage employees to stay at home when they’re feeling sick. If they don’t have to worry about losing a week or two of their paycheck, they’re more likely to stay home.
This decreases the number of employees who try to hide being sick and put other employees at risk.
3. Offer a Carry Over Policy
If you want to improve the way you handle sick employees, it’s a good idea to reevaluate your workplace guidelines. If you don’t already have one in place, consider adding a carryover policy to your employee handbook.
Since people fluctuate with their health, some people might have a few good years and a few bad ones. If you allow employees to carry over some unused sick days to the following year, this can give them enough time to recover without having to worry about their paycheck.
4. Set Protocols to Identify Illness
One of the best ways to handle sick employees is to look for signs of being sick to avoid the spread of viruses and germs. One easy way to do this is with temperature checks as employees walk into work. A face recognition time clock offers touchless thermal scans to check for employee temperatures.
Offering rapid testing at work is another way to identify illness quickly and ensure the safety of all employees working close to one another.
5. Help Employees Manage Their Health
Handling sick employees also includes promoting workplace wellness. Offering preventative measures like vaccination at the workplace is one vital way of taking care of your team.
A good healthcare program will also help employees take charge of their health.
Manage Sick Employees With These Tips
If you want to learn how to handle sick employees, follow the tips in this guide. Consider updating your leave policies and set protocols to identify employees who are sick.
Check out some of the other health blogs on our site for more helpful tips.
