By Karen Hanna
Companies still grappling with how to manage COVID-19 protocols should carefully size up their workforce to determine the kinds of policies that will find acceptance, according to a human resources management expert.
For their part, workers are making the same types of evaluations — and, amid an ongoing labor shortage and virus surge, businesses with policies that aren’t well-matched to their workers could suffer.
“If we had a climate where right now we had more and more people wanting to work than jobs available, the conversations might be different, because people want to hold on to what they’ve got, to their job. But people are feeling they get that COVID clarity, and they’re like, ‘OK, you don’t work for what I believe in … I’m leaving, I’m walking out the door,’ and walking out that door is sometimes 10 years of institutional knowledge,” said Emily Dickens, chief of staff and head of government affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Alexandria, Va.
While SHRM has had no official position on mandating COVID-19 vaccines, Dickens said her organization includes businesses that welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Jan. 13 to nix a federal mandate that would have established a test-or-vax regimen at workplaces with 100 or more employees.
The decision doesn’t affect internal company policies or laws at the state or local level, Dickens said. Some states have banned mandates; other jurisdictions, such as New York City and Washington, D.C., have imposed their own.
Though safe and effective, the vaccines have proved polarizing; according to the Mayo Clinic, in the U.S., only about 63 percent of people who are eligible for the shots have received a full series, not including boosters. But that is just one issue a mandate would have presented for companies, Dickens said.
Also of concern was the administrative work of tracking shots and exemption requests that would have been raised by a federal mandate.
“In the middle of having a talent gap, where you have so many people leaving and there’s so many open jobs, you had people who were just overwhelmed with these additional requests. And so, I think that’s one of the things, one of the reasons, why people did breathe a sigh of relief,” Dickens said.
Even so, Dickens said SHRM has seen businesses enact their own rules — and they might very well maintain those policies, or even expand them to include boosters.
“If they’ve got a workforce that says, ‘... We think this is important,’ I think they will go ahead, because they’ve already got the mechanisms in place to track it,” Watkins said. Still others, having convinced their workers to be vaccinated, will take a more voluntary approach, by simply encouraging uptake of boosters.
According to SHRM, 24 percent of businesses have said that 80 percent or more of their workforce already is fully vaccinated.
Whatever path companies take, they should remain sensitive to the needs and expectations of their workers, said Dickens, who stressed the importance of company culture in determining policies that work.
“We hear a lot about the employees who say, ‘There’s no way I’m getting vaccinated; you’re not going to impact my personal life.’ But then there’s also just as well the voice of the employee that says, ‘I don’t mind coming in the office and working, but you’ve got to tell me that I’m going to be safe here so that I’m not bringing something home,’ ” she said.
Karen Hanna, senior staff reporter
Contact:
Society for Human Resource Management, Alexandria, Va., 800-283-7476, www.shrm.org
