With government officials urging sick workers to stay home and employers to be flexible and accommodating, there are four actions employment attorney suggest you avoid:
- Maintaining rigid policies. In efforts to ensure productivity, it may be tempting to keep or begin inflexible sick leave policies. However, lawyers suggest this could make sick workers feel pressured to come to work and hide their condition. Under Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules, employers must protect employees against known workplace hazard. Making workers feel like they have to come to work when sick goes against this guidance.
- Applying policies inconsistently. If you relax certain parts of your sick-leave policies, be sure to apply these consistently across the board for all employees.
- Ignoring leave laws. All sick-leave policies must comply with state and local laws, and these may mandate that employers to provide leave.
- Failing to encourage sick workers to stay home. You need to actively encourage sick employees to stay home if they have symptoms of acute respiratory illness, including fever. Employees should be fever-free for 24 hours without medication use before returning to work.
