Communicable Disease And Your Employee Handbook

How do you handle and manage the COVID-19 communicable disease when it comes to your employee handbooks?

Hey there, Childcare Boss. This is your coach, Andrea Dickerson. I know by now, several of you may have questions concerning your COVID communicable disease policy.

I wouldn’t necessarily call it COVID; it’s just in general. Do you have questions concerning your communicable disease policy? Right now, childcare business owners are going back to work, and parents are getting things back to normal. By now I’m sure you have thought about updating your handbooks concerning your communicable disease policy. When creating your communicable disease policy in times like this, you definitely want to create a document that staff will sign as well as parents that they will sign stating that if they have been involved in any communicable disease that they shall provide you with information and disclose it to you so that you can respond as a responsible employer to protect the children, the staff, and parents that your service.

We had a Brainstorming With The Bosses session this month. It was discussed how this could be a violation of HIPPA. If you want to assist your company in staying aware as to the health and condition of employees, then it is your responsibility that you create a document that tells your team what you are expecting of them so that they can comply with your expectations.

Understand Your Policy

The second area of communicable disease is to understand your policy that the state requires from you. I know in my childcare business, whenever a child has been exposed to any communicable disease that the parents are notified through some type of posting and/or through your communication processes. Now for me, I would definitely feel more comfortable with doing a face to face communication with my parents or verbal communication and having it posted in my childcare business on my wall rather than having an email or text go out. With parents being less aware of their judgment, social media can get a hold of that disclaimer and cause a big to-do in your business that you don’t want. Think about how are you going to handle communicable disease if a child, or parent, or even staff member have been exposed to a communicable disease.

Become very familiar with your Center for Disease Control and Prevention policies

You want to be very clear in your policies your incubation periods and what will suffice for returning back to your organization if at all. Also, be sure to write a statement about your company’s compliance with all applicable statutes and regulations that protect the privacy of persons who have a communicable disease and that every effort will be made to ensure procedurally sufficient safeguards to maintain the personnel’s confidence about persons who have a communicable disease. However, you also want to document that you will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on the individual having a communicable disease. However, you will need a doctor’s assurance that this person can be in a workplace environment safely.

These documents can be provided by your local hospitals or doctor offices. If for some reason, a staff member can not comply with this request, be sure to contact your health department to find out if this is something that can be rectified through the health department visit. Also, like I always tell my clients, check with your local Department of Labor. There may be some employee or employer-based rules that you’ll need to know when it comes to communicable diseases. I would love to continue to help you build your policies. You can join me so that I can help build your policies with you by logging onto www.jumpstartblueprint.com.