It's real people - let's make a plan

Alert level 3 to Alert level 4 – It’s real people. 

If your people can work from home.  Great.  If they can’t, well they are on the subsidy and using annual leave to top up wages.  The subsidy has been extended to cover all employees now.

The $150k has been relaxed to stop mass redundancies and an influx of people seeking the benefit.  After all, $150k for 12 weeks only assists small to medium employers businesses.

There are still a lot of unknowns for what essential services look like.  We also don’t know what arrangement the government has made with banks.  We will need to keep watching the news.
 
How do you create certainty for your team when you are unsure yourself? 

Well, you make a plan and communicate it.  With a plan comes confidence. 

As soon as possible you need to reconfirm, or agree, if not already discussed on the following in the next 48 hours with your people.

You give your team confidence and certainty by sharing your plan and getting their input on it, before making arbitrary decisions.  Don’t rush covering these points off with your team.

• How and when you will communicate updates and seek feedback on ideas/changes.
• Collect everyone’s contact details and contact details for emergency contacts or next of kin.
• Who are the people to approach when your team has concerns and requests for support.
• When will you be closing the doors and who may have access to the building.
• What work needs to be continued from a distance and by who.
• What is happening to your employee’s pay if they are working fewer hours or not working at all.
• How your team advise you that they have been diagnosed and what is your process for applying for the government leave payments.

How we can help you:

• Peer review and drafting communications for your team about their employment status.
• Advice on the wage subsidy and how it works if your people get paid more or less than the subsidy levels, or if they work variable hours.
• Advice on the use of existing leave entitlements.
• Advice on restructures and change processes under way or being contemplated
• Interpreting employee agreements in the current circumstances.

We are all going to be suffering some sort of hardship as a result of today’s announcements.

With this in mind, we have come up with a COVID-19 Employee Comms and Advice package for $850*. This gives you expert HR support for:

• Drafting employee letters
• Drafting team memos
• On-call HR queries over Zoom or phone
• Workforce strategy session in preparation for when you reopen via Zoom
• Free recruitment listings on our Stapleton Consulting Jobs website until 31 August 2020, when we assist with your post COVID-19 recruitments.

We would normally do this work on an hourly rate basis but we decided you need certainty just as much as your team does.
 
We work remotely so we are prepared and ready for this.  We work in cloud and can share information easily over the internet.
 
If you don’t need the service package mentioned above you can still call us for advice.  First 15 mins is always free, and then after that our hourly rate is $160* for businesses and $135* for not for profits or charitable organisations.

Emma and I both have young children so we will be juggling our family responsibilities with work like many others out there.  So it is likely that we will take phone and Zoom queries during the day, and enjoy time between calls with our children while the sun is up.  Then we will do computer work while the sun is down.

Conversations in the office right now suggest that seeing kids faces or voices in work calls, or online meetings, could become common.  I love my children and I apologise now for them adding their 2 cents worth into our conversations later.