GA NonprofitsPlanning Guidance for COVID 19 and related resources

Planning Guidance: What should nonprofit employers be concerned about?

Caring for Employees Caring for Stakeholders

Planning for Business Continuity

Thinking through Levels of Impact and Scenario Planning

Caring for Employees

From a workforce standpoint, there are three main areas of concern:

1. Legal and safety requirements

2. Human care and concern

3. Workforce continuity and productivity planning

Legal & Safety Requirements From an OSHA standpoint:

There is no specific OSHA standard covering COVID-19. However, some OSHA requirements may apply to preventing occupational exposure to COVID-19. Among the most relevant are:

• The General Duty Clause, Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, 29 USC 654(a)(1), which requires employers to furnish to each worker “employment and a place of employment, which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

What does this mean?

You need to ensure that you address the employee risk related to potential COVID 19 exposure in your office location. This may include general hygiene information and increased cleaning supplies, or depending on your type of agency, (for example a community health center) it could include very strenuous measures to ensure they have specialized supplies, equipment, or training related.

In addition, some cleaning products have safety regulations related to employee exposure.

Last, before you require masks and other ‘supplies’ you may want to seek guidance as those may pose a legal risk from an employer standpoint.

Nonprofit Employers should visit the OSHA website to review these OSHA requirements and standards and to seek specific guidance. https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/covid-19/standards.html

From a general accommodation/regulatory standpoint:

If an employee requests to work from home and work from home is possible, you may be legally required to make an exception. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act may require reasonable accommodation of employees who are disabled, have a history of a disability or are “regarded as” having a disability.

Employers should consider the unique risks for employees who may be immuno-compromised, live with young children or elderly household members.

There are a host of plausible regulatory issues to consider: Pro Bono Partnership www.pbpa.org may have online resources that can help.

Do not disclose individual health information

If you learn that an employee has COVID-19, tell employees generally of the exposure or potential exposure, and explain any precautions you are taking in the workplace.

Do not identify the individual employee(s) with COVID-19

If an employee who was suspected of having or did have COVID-19 is ready to come back, but you are not sure if they should return to work, contact an attorney for guidance.

Caring for Employees: Let’s be human

Communicate

01Create visible signs of your responsiveness

02Plan for disruption

03

Communicate

REMEMBER THAT PEOPLE EXHIBIT ANXIETY IN DIFFERENT WAYS.

REMEMBER THAT EMPLOYEES TRUST THEIR EMPLOYER TO DO THE RIGHT

THING

REMEMBER THAT EMPLOYEES WILL FORGIVE OVER-REACTION, BUT

NEVER UNDER-REACTION.

Communicate

1

Create a way to communicate clearly and consistently with all staff. This may be in an all hands meeting, a virtual meeting or information repository,

Use this as an opportunity to provide education about

• trusted sources for public health information,

• how to manage relevant personal safety

2

Clearly state your sick leave and remote work policies and expectations.

3

Clearly state and clarify your policies about what employees should do if they feel they have been exposed to COVID 19, or potentially may have COVID 19.

4

Clearly define the measures you will take to ensure you are staying abreast of the situation and taking all precautions possible.

Some Recommendations:

• Create a distributable document or area on your website with relevant links that point to trusted educational resources, existing benefit descriptions, personnel policies, and internal clarification for requesting accommodations, leave, or voicing concerns.

• Ensure that you create policies about coming to work when ill, reporting COVID exposure or what employees should do if they have COVID.

• Consider holding an all hands education meeting to review this material. Use this as an opportunity to ask staff what would lower their anxiety.

• Consider creating a laddered response document clarifying for senior staff, or all staff, how you plan to react to specific triggers should the outbreak escalate or persist.

Some Recommendations

Involve staff in thinking about your COVID response.

Varying staff will have different anxiety levels that may be personal such as financial concerns related to loosing hours, day care considerations if they will be working longer hours, or general health concerns. Involving them in relevant ways will improve trust and cooperation.

Staff may want to have a tangible action they can help with – such as cleaning office surfaces on a more frequent basis.

Staff may also have novel ideas about how to navigate business continuity or reduce exposure risk.

Now might be a good time to plan for workforce disruption

Every nonprofit is different and there are a myriad ways that a disaster or crisis might impact your workforce. In general, employers who can need to consider plans to remote work. This includes:

Consider what information you might need to access remotely: for example: Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Quickbooks, or other cloud based applications that support remote access. Again, remember HIPPA regs, and other legal requirements for your type of information.

Consider how supervisors will interact and how employees will remain productive or which employees can remain productive in a remote situation.

Consider critical employee absences; do you have redundancy plans? Passwords to critical files or platforms? Key work in progress and access to it?

Consider if and when you might need to furlough certain staff, review your policies, create a holding statement for employee communication and support resources.

Caring for Stakeholders

Be transparent

1

Create visible signs of your care

2

Ensure you communicate clearly

3

Think about alternative access opportunities

4

Be Transparent

Consider transparently communicating how you are responding to the crisis to your clients, patrons, and key stakeholders by:

• Communicating what you are doing to keep stakeholders safe

• Examine your refund, cancelation, or participation policies and adapt them if needed.

• Conduct meetings virtually if needed.

• Think about how you might discuss business disruption, or capacity limitations with your audiences/clients/patients/the public and your board and donors.

Create visible signs of care

Consider putting up signage about what you are doing to respond

Increase hand sanitizing tools around your facility

Offer options for virtual participation or meetings if plausible and make these public by posting them on your website.

Communicate Clearly

If you need to communicate immediately with stakeholders what is your plan?

Consider creating holding statements that can be used if:

• you must close or cancel services

• you have an exposure event, consider creating a holding statement that could immediately be deployed to those who may have been exposed.

Think about who should release the statements, where they should be released (website, press, other?), and who will field questions.

Consider how you will pull contact data if applicable (for registrants, participants, etc.)

Consider creating a crisis communication team to create a thorough plan.

Alternative access

Consider how you might offer alternative ways to access or provide your service if plausible.

If you cannot offer remote access, how can you reduce overall interaction or contact exposure.

Can you alter your schedule?

Business Continuity Planning

Leaders should pull together a continuity planning team to consider:

WORKFORCE DISRUPTION OR

SUDDEN PRESSURE

CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENTS

MISSION DISRUPTION OR

CAPACITY PRESSURE

INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS

AND ACCESS

FINANCIAL SCENARIO PLANNING

Build Scenarios for each area

1

Identify business impacts

2

Brainstorm mitigation strategies (WFH, cloud apps, etc.)

3

Build 3 tier scenarios

4

Detail trigger points and actions related

5

Identify costs, roles/responsibilities

6

Document and communicate to relevant parties

Example: Financial Scenario Planning

Document the Plan Resource on end slides

Create Create trigger points and actions for each scenario

Do Do your best to build a best, middle, worse case scenario

Understand Understand your liquidity needs

Know Know your numbers now

COVID Ladder Response Example

General Context for your agency’s response. • Align with your values (i.e. we take

care of our employees)• What is the context of your work?

(medical, arts, other?) and how does this inform the context of your response?

Should Consider Level 0 – 4 response Triggers & Actions

Example follows for a ‘regular’ office environment (medical, emergency assistance, education, etc. may be different)

Level Trigger Action

0 Low risk situation less than 100 cases in metro region. • Standing crisis team (senior team) continually reviews new information as it comes in (CDC, Infectious Disease Society, GA DOH)

• Establish a 4 tier escalation ladder for response and mobilization of teams to prepare.

• Ensure environment is clean and that cleaning supplies and personal sanitation support is readily available.

• Ensure larger team understands our response framework, & understands the virus and how to protect themselves.

• Ensure team understands our sick leave and WFH policies and procedures. • Make sure Departments are taking required actions to support continued business

continuity and stakeholder communications. Crisis plan updates due X

1 More than 100 instances of unidentified origin cases among non-relatives/co-habitators outside a hospital setting, occurring in the commuting radius of Atlanta. Measured mortality rate remains 1% or above. Observed transmission rate remains above 1.5

• We may ask certain employees to WFH in an impacted area. • We will offer WFH for all employees in the impacted area• We will enhance office cleaning schedules to be more frequent/in-depth, especially in

high traffic areas. • We will ask all leaders to start making plans for continuity of operations/identification

and planning for critical workloads to WFH or virtual. • Change intake or visitor interviews

2 (aka local containment is

failing)

More than 1000 events as above or any government quarantine actions in the commute range of Atlanta. Measured mortality rate remains 1% or above. Observed transmission rate remains above 1.5.

• Most employees will be voluntary WFH at this point. Especially imuno compromised individuals, those habituating with elderly or babies/young children.

Supervisors will need to: Have weekly senior team meetings/cals Create individual workplans and objectives for staff and have minimally 1x per week

calls will staff. Hold weekly department calls or Zoom meetings• Stop all visitors to office or create intake screening Client service should be held via technology/virtual rather than in person.

3 (worst case) More than 5000 infections in metro region with increasingly upward trend (doubling interval is 10 days or less). Measured mortality rate is 1% or above. Observed transmission rate is above 1.5.

• Office is completely WFH

COVID 19 Information Resources

• A simple, short and easy-to-understand video about COVID-19 and personal care (CBC News)

• Print-friendly “What to know” information sheet (Infectious Disease Society of America)

• Official U.S. overview, updates, and self-care for COVID-19 (CDC)

• International travel advisories (U.S. State Dept.)

COVID 19 Stakeholder Care

• For clinicians and other direct healthcare providers: (some free) Accredited continuing education opportunities and other resources(Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education)

• For arts institutions and other agencies organizing routine public gatherings: Guidance for readying large community events (CDC)

• For K-12, higher education, and childcare: Resources and information for schools and school personnel (U.S. Dept. of Education)

• General information: www.CDC.gov

COVID 19 Organization Care

• COVID-19 information and commentary for employers (Occupational Safety and Health Administration)

• Cleaning products approved for fighting COVID-19 (EPA)

• Crisis communication plan template (CDC)

• Nonprofit financial scenario planning tool (The Wallace Foundation)

• Low cost or free cloud based platforms Techsoup.org

• Legal advice (metro Atlanta) Pro Bono Partnership PBPA.org

• Planning tools, advice, etc. www.gcn.org

www.GCN.org