Part Three
NO person or company is ever fully ready to face a crisis and contagion such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a phenomenon that businesses have limited experience (considering the last major contagion-related crisis was the SARS in 2003) in navigating. Ensuring timely, concise and transparent business communications to all stakeholders will be important in these volatile times.
Companies will need to be prepared to communicate all known risks to all its employees and ensure that any infection event triggers the right organizational response to minimize further contamination in the workplace. Throughout the quarantine period, companies will need to exercise due care and diligence in communicating the next steps to all employees.
Together with managing internal stakeholders, managing public stakeholders through clear communication plays an important role to minimize the negative publicity for the infection event of the business. Ensuring that external stakeholders such as investors and customers are onboard with the actions being taken by the management establishes the necessary trust needed by the business.
With a purview of the negative financial impact of Covid-19 on businesses, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has taken an active step to avoid mass employment losses in the country resulting from retrenchments and redundancies that companies normally take during periods of financial distress.
On March 4, 2020, DOLE issued Labor Advisory No. 9 providing the implementation guidelines to urge companies to adopt a flexible working arrangement in lieu of termination of employment through retrenchments and/or redundancies. The last similar issuance by the DOLE was way back in 2009 during the global financial crisis of 2008.
Under the said Labor Advisory, DOLE is encouraging businesses to adopt work reduction schemes to minimize labor costs while still retaining the employees such as:
- Reduction of working hours or working days—this effectively reduces the employee’s working hours from the standard 40 hours a week, subject to an agreed pay cut for the reduction of working hours or days.
- Rotation of workers—normally adopted together with reduction of working days, which normally is implemented such that a group of employee works on Monday to Wednesday and another group works from Thursday to Saturday.
- Forced leave—this allows employees to go on weeks or months of unpaid leave, after fully consuming their holiday credits.
Do note that flexible working arrangement being discussed pertains to DOLE’s definition of flexible working arrangement (i.e., working hours reduction, forced leave, etc.) rather than the common use of the term for businesses (e.g., telecommuting, work from home, etc.). Whatever scheme the company may decide to adopt, this will need to be agreed first with the employees and filed together with the necessary report to the DOLE.
To minimize the contagion risks of the disease in the workplace, companies recently with confirmed cases of Covid-19 employees have taken an initiative to allow employees to work from home or telecommute. Many start-ups and businesses have already adopted this scheme as part of their business-as-usual but the dynamics of working from home can be different when adopting such schemes on a prolonged basis.
Preparing for a prolonged telecommuting scheme will require development of written policies to document how office-based policies can be adopted to work-from-home arrangements such as time-in and attendance. More than a written policy though, a critical success factor for a working prolonged or permanent telecommuting scheme is the provision of the necessary tools for the employees to continue working without going to the office.
Necessary tools will depend on the employees’ nature of work and how work can be done effectively and normally includes hardware, software and Internet connection components. Hardware components such as laptop (especially for businesses that rely on desktop computers), input (e.g., keyboard and mouse) and output (e.g., printer and second screen) devices and headset will normally be necessary together with software components (e.g., collaboration tools and productivity tools) and Internet connectivity will normally need to be provided to the employees.
Considering these factors, businesses need to make sure that budgets are ready to enable employees to work from home with minimal friction to lessen operational disruption on the business.
(To be continued)
Filbert Tsai is a Certified Public Accountant and is the chief strategist at UpSmart Strategy Consulting Inc.
This column accepts contributions from accountants, especially articles that are of interest to the accountancy profession, in particular, and to the business community, in general. These can be e-mailed to boa.secretariat.@gmail.com.