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As we find ourselves in the midst of a global crisis, we are seeing examples of people and companies stepping up to play their part. There are a multitude of companies on the frontlines of this fight, operating as essential businesses, such as healthcare, manufacturing, first-responders, supply chain, grocery stores and more. These essential businesses cannot stay open if they do not ensure they are being safe and healthy.

Employee health is the priority, but it's not the only challenge. There is an increased demand for more essential consumer transactions which is causing supermarkets and marketplaces to hire at rapid rates. There are constant changes to policies and best practices for workplace safety, specifically for healthcare workers, employees working with food or businesses where employees share space with others. Updating policies and executing contracts for hiring and onboarding can no longer be done through traditional contracting methods. Internally, legal departments must work alongside HR and operations to ensure the businesses that need to stay open can.

Here are three ways essential businesses can address the challenges created by COVID-19.

1. Policy updates 

As an essential business, you need simple and effective ways to transparently communicate your policies. Consider creating a legal center to house your policy updates for employees to see. Companies should develop a general precaution policy for employees or contractors covering hygiene, modified work schedules, employees experiencing sickness and employees who may have been exposed.

2. Symptom Screening 

Essential businesses are seeing the importance of workplace safety like never before. Without the option to work remotely, these businesses must ensure each employee is healthy before coming in. This means screening each employee to assess symptoms and produce documentation for compliance.

The most effective way to do this is by creating mobile-friendly screening forms that employees can fill out prior to starting a shift. You can even set up automations for the necessary documents from the symptom screening. At the minimum, essential businesses need to have an employee and contractor screening policy acknowledgment form that is published to employees and/or contractors for self-screening and acknowledgment of the policy.

3. Hiring and Onboarding 

Many of these essential businesses are hiring in unprecedented quantities. For example, Amazon hired 100,000 new employees in March and plans to hire 75,000 more warehouse and distribution workers in April. With such large numbers of employees to onboard at once, businesses need to automate the process.

The key to rapid onboarding is self-service contracts, which allow you to create the content of the contract once and add placeholders for each new employee to sign and fill in the required information. To hire employees, businesses will need a general form they can publish to create an at-will employment relationship. Although, be aware state laws may vary on this. For contracted employees, businesses should have a general form outlining tasks and compensation.

As things continue to change, be sure you are prepared to communicate with your employees and customers. In order for essential businesses to continue operating, legal teams must figure out how to get policy updates in front of employees, automate symptom screening and hire and onboard rapidly.

When we look back at this time, we will see the businesses that thrived were ones with fast, efficient business models. Businesses will continue to adopt the mindset of moving fast, and this will require efficient, seamless contract solutions.

 

Brian Powers is the founder and CEO of PactSafe and a licensed attorney. As the CEO, Brian leads the strategic vision of the company's high-velocity contract acceptance platform.  Prior to founding PactSafe, Brian's law practice focused primarily on representing the transactional needs of tech companies. Brian is a frequent speaker, instructor and author on topics ranging from clickthrough contract acceptance to privacy-related consent management.