Episode 28 – COVID-19: Communicating with Employees

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

This is Jason Risley, the senior editor of digital and new media at TRSA. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast sponsored by 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. In the last episode, doctor Murray Cohen, a retired US Centers For Disease Control and World Health Organization epidemiologist, gave us an overview of the COVID 19 pandemic and how to prepare your business and employees for the possibility of processing potentially contaminated linens and garments. Additionally, Joseph Ricci, the president and CEO of TRSA, discussed TRSA’s development of materials for its members to communicate to their customers, employees, and leadership teams about COVID 19. On today’s episode, we’ll tackle another topic related to COVID 19.

 

Catalina Dongo, the director of human resources at UniFirst Corporation, joins us to share tips on how to communicate with your employees about the virus and outline several best to put in place at your organization to deal with the crisis unfolding worldwide. Good morning, everybody. My name is Catalina Dongo. I am the director of human resources for UniFirst Corporation, and I am going to spend the next few minutes talking about employee communications, what we have done at UniFirst, and then also share some best practices in regards to communicating with employees in a crisis situation. So the first thing that I would recommend, if you haven’t already, is that you formalize a crisis response team.

 

This should be in place not just for the coronavirus, but really for any type of crisis that you need to be able to respond to that quickly. My recommendation is that your CEO should be the chair of this crisis response team, and the reason for that is you don’t want to be held up with escalating questions or needing approvals in order to take action. You wanna be able to implement your plan and your response fairly quickly, so my recommendation is that your CEO, should be the chair for this committee. In addition, there should be it should really be a cross functional team with, high level members of operations, environmental health and safety, human resources, and risk management. I recommend that the crisis response team meets regularly and is able to adapt to very fluid situations as is usually the case with any sort of crisis.

 

So that would be my recommendation as your first step if you haven’t already that you you formalize that team. Then the next thing that I would recommend as a focus is equipping our managers. For us at UniFirst, we are very geographically dispersed, and I know that’s the case for a lot of you. Your, corporate support staff may not be there in person to assist managers with frontline questions. And so equipping managers should be the next focus for your crisis response team.

 

Holding informational meetings or training sessions for your managers would be my recommendation. Making sure that they’re well educated and, and that you’re sharing resources. For us, it was sharing information about COVID 19, making sure that we are using only reliable sources for our managers, that they’re not going to the news, for example, as a source of information, and that they’re only channeling information that you deem appropriate. In our case, it’s only relying on information from the CDC, from who, from other, local public health organizations, or even TRSA. You wanna make sure you’re providing managers clear, actionable guidelines for what and how they should be communicating with, our frontline employees.

 

You don’t wanna leave it up to them to, come up with what’s the best way or what they should say. So you really should be providing them very, very clear guidelines in that respect. I also recommend that you have a single point of contact for your managers. It can get really hectic and confusing for in in any crisis. And with COVID 19, you your managers are gonna be getting our managers are getting a lot of questions from from customers, from employees, from different sources, and we don’t want them going to different people to get responses.

 

So you want to formulate a a clear path and a single point of contact that can then, talk to different parties throughout the organization, but the manager should have that one point to go to. We wanna make sure that we’re balancing responsible action, without creating panic. And what I mean by responsible action, it is our duty. It is our responsibility to make make sure that we are providing a a safe workplace for our employees. There are some OSHA requirements that may actually apply to COVID 19, but COVID 19 may actually be a recordable illness, if a worker were to be infected on the job.

 

So we do have to take it serious, but we also wanna make sure that we’re balancing that responsible action with making sure that we’re not creating panic with our employees and we’re not coming off across as, alarmist. So after equipping the managers, we want to make sure that we are educating our employees. The focus for our communications right now has been general education just like we did with our managers. It’s providing employees with information about what is COVID 19, again, using only very reliable resources, and then ensuring your employees that we are monitoring the situation, we’re staying abreast, we’re following guidance from the CDC. Even if there isn’t necessarily a lot of tangible action happening just yet, the fact that we’re reassuring them and we’re communicating can go a long way in, making employees feel good about what you’re doing in terms of COVID 19.

 

The next focus has been promoting good hygiene. It should always be, important and top of mind, but even more so with the current situation. So we are reinforcing good hygiene as much as we can, educating them on a proper way to wash their hands, avoiding touching their eyes. We actually what kind of questions we need to be asking. We what kind of questions we need to be asking.

 

We are promoting that you refrain from handshaking and instead incorporate whether it’s a fist bump or an elbow bump. But, again, we are really stepping up and communicating with employees and reinforcing good hygiene. Personal protective equipment. Again, this is something that should always be a priority, but now more than ever, our instruction to managers is making sure that they are monitoring the floor, making sure that employees are wearing the proper PPE, distributing new PPE as needed, reinforcing the correct use of PPE with the RSRs as well. Sometimes they’re out on the road.

 

We’re not necessarily able to walk the floor as we can with production employees, so making sure that these things are being covered with RSRs, that they’re wearing gloves, same for back dock employees, wash aisle employees, making sure they’re all using the correct PPE anytime they’re handling soil garments. Now for a brief message. What areas are the biggest challenges for facilities seeking hygienically clean certification? With 6 disciplines, I’ve had the chance to work with several laundry organizations and spend time in their plants. Prior to working in the laundry industry, I worked in QA and project management for a large company in the energy sector.

 

So I know that the challenges of getting and maintaining certifications are real. One challenge I’ve seen for the laundry industry is that many facilities haven’t had to document their procedures and keep records on such a wide range of topics before. The idea of having a comprehensive QA manual is new to them. Finding the time and internal resources to pull it all together can be an obstacle, but our service directly overcomes this obstacle. In some cases, changes to the actual plan and service operations will need to be made.

 

This requires planning, implementation, and training everyone involved. The plant and service managers have to work together and make sure those changes stick. Another challenge, specifically in the food service and food safety programs, is developing a HACCP plan. HACCP stands for hazard analysis and critical control points. It mirrors the type of risk based analysis that the FDA requires for food producers and services.

 

Developing a HACCP plan is one area that tends to be somewhat confusing for the laundry operators. But, really, there are great upsides too. Just the process of preparing for HCC certification will help make the organization better. Ideally, the management team can use preparing for certification as a way to do a thorough look at at how they run the plant and make sure they’re up to date with the best management practices. Not to mention the obvious benefit of becoming HC certified, which more and more textile customers are requiring.

 

So, yes, there are challenges to getting ready for certification, and this is exactly why TRSA partnered with 6 disciplines to provide a third party service to help and guide its member organizations along the way. What is a good approach to certifying multiple facilities? First of all, each facility needs to have their own QA manual. You can’t get around that because each facility is different, but certifying multiple facilities gives you a great opportunity as a company. What I mean is that you can use the hygienically clean best management practices to help standardize your operation across different locations.

 

Where there are differences between buildings and operations, you’ll have to account for those, of course. These are things like airflow direction from clean to soil, which depends on the building layout. But at the level of a policy and many procedures, you get the benefit of being consistent across all your operations. This is the approach I would take as your consultant and coach based on my QA experience, and This is the approach I would take as your consultant and coach based on my QA experience and background. I’d work with a corporate management and, starting from the agency standard, create company wide policies.

 

These don’t have to be complicated, just a statement of your expectations for all sites. That ensures your consistency. Then I’d work with each of your sites. Starting from the policies, we’d write straightforward procedures that state how they’ll implement the policies. In many cases, the sites will have common procedures, but there can be exceptions.

 

If it meets your business and customer needs, I wouldn’t hesitate to certify multiple sites. How do you recommend preparing for multiple certifications at the same location? There’s quite a bit of overlap between all of the standards, so it’s certainly doable. I’d recommend contacting TRSA for information about multi certification discounts that might apply to you. As your HSC consultant, I would approach it this way.

 

I would consolidate all the standards into one QA manual as much as possible. I’d make sure each section in the manual cross references the certification standards that apply. That way, you can be sure your procedures are complying to all the best management practices for the certifications you need, and you won’t be duplicating your efforts. As you move through this process, it’s good to think ahead even if you wanna get one certification now and another in the future. Good planning will pay off for your next certification.

 

An important focus will be to make it as easy as possible for the HC inspector. The more clear and organized the QA manual is, the better you can demonstrate to the inspector that you comply with all the requirements of all the standards. There is one exception in that the health care certification requires its own manual, but the process of preparing for a health care certification and another certification should take the same shared approach. Six disciplines consulting and coaching will take all of this into account when helping you plan your certification journey. Just to wrap things up, how can our listeners reach you for more information?

 

The best way to reach me is actually through TRSA. If you would reach out to Angela Freeman at TRSA, she refers people requesting help and certification through to me. Great. Thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks so much, Jason.

 

Now back to the episode. So the methods we, are using to reach our employees, we are, of course, sort of the staples distributing literature, making sure if you have employees who don’t speak English in your location, you’re translating those communications into their preferred language. Both PRSA and the CDC have provided great literature that we can leverage already translated in English and in Spanish. Our recommendation is that you post this literature in high traffic areas, visible areas. Also consider handouts and even home mailings.

 

Depending on your particular situation and your employee population, these may actually be very effective. We want the employees to be educated, and we wanna promote good hygiene, but it’s not gonna help us if at home their immediate families aren’t educated and also following the same protocols. So home mailing may actually be a good resource, and something that you you could, consider leveraging. We ask our managers to hold small meetings or huddles with all of their employees. This not only allows them to express concerns, it shows them that we’re taking the matter very seriously, but you always want to try and reach employees through different methods.

 

Right? So there’s the distributed literature, but also being able to have conversations with them is important. We have asked them to make visible efforts in terms of, cleanliness and PPE and communicate this to the employees through the small heart hurdles. Video messaging can also be very effective. Again, it’s just another way of communicating with employees.

 

Having either your CEO or your head of environmental health and safety record a video that you can show, whether you have common TVs that employees can can see or an intranet. Somehow, if you can get video messaging to employees, we have found that works really well. And then the last thing that we are doing is we are developing a central repository for all COVID 19 information to be housed under. That way, employees don’t have to be phishing through chains of emails or wondering if the poster on the wall is the latest and most updated information. And if you have the ability to do that, leveraging something like a SharePoint or whatever intranet technology you have can be very helpful.

 

You can segment the information whether it’s just to messaging for your managers or messages for your general employee population. This can be, again, very effective. Like to talk a little bit about travel. So, you probably all know that the CDC has classified certain countries as the level, 1, 2, or 3. These countries are China, Iran, Italy, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, which all have been by the CDC assigned a different a different level.

 

At UniFirst, what we have done out of an abundance of, precaution is that we have restricted all nonessential business travel to all of Europe, and all of Asia. So we are going a little bit above and beyond, the countries identified specifically by the CDC, and we have just restricted, all business travel to Europe and Asia for now. We will continue monitor the situation. As of today, we have not restricted travel outside of Europe and Asia. We have not restricted travel within the US.

 

That’s not to say that we may not change course depending on how things develop. It is a very fluid situation, but that’s where we’re at right now. Employees who are returning from travel, whether it’s personal or they were there for business before we, implemented the restriction, if these countries are, at any of the levels identified by the CDC, we are asking those employees to stay home for 14 days. Again, we’re just following really CDC guidelines here. Employees returning from any other travel, whether it’s national or international, we’re not asking them to stay home.

 

However, we are asking them to self monitor and report any flu like symptoms right away so that we can evaluate proper action. And then at that point, it’s really taken on a case by case basis depending on the circumstances, for that particular employee. The most important thing in regards to travel is that you’re constantly communicating with your crisis response team and taking action swiftly based on whatever new developments may occur. In regards to meetings and events, as of right now, we have not canceled any meetings or events. However, we have asked employees to refrain from scheduling any new large meetings or events.

 

Unless approved by senior leadership, this should be discussed, but we’re asking employees really not to do that. We’re encouraging them to leverage technology as much as possible to replace in person meeting. And then we, as I mentioned earlier, also are promoting, greetings that minimize contact. So we’re we’re asking people to refrain from handshakes and just virtual high fives, fist bumps, elbow bumps, whatever works for you, again, to minimize the potential, of spreading the virus. The last thing I’ll leave you with is attendance and leave policies.

 

So we are enforcing our PTO or sick leave or vacation pay. If an employee is being asked to stay home, we’re we’re allowing them the option to work from home if they can. If they cannot, due to a particular job or position, then we are giving them the option to select which, paid time off bank they want to use to help cover for those 2 weeks. We have relaxed our attendance policy, and so any absences related to COVID 19 or potentially COVID 19 will absolutely not count against attendance. We’re using the same protocol for employees who, need to take some time off because their, children’s school was closed, and we’ve had a handful of those where there’s either the particular school or the school district has closed down.

 

We’re being flexible with employees, making sure they have the time they need to make arrangements. FMLA, ADA, local leave laws may definitely apply, so it’s something to keep in mind when you’re dealing with attendance issues due to COVID 19. And our recommendation, as always, is that our managers work closely with HR and safety to ensure consistent application and communication And, that is the end of my message in regards to employee communications. Thank you. You can access a variety of materials on COVID 19 specifically designed for members of the linen, uniform, and facility services industry at www.

 

Trsa.org/covid19. Again, that’s www.trsa.org/ covid19. Today’s episode of the podcast featured excerpts from a recent webinar titled coronavirus, COVID 19, communication tools for your customers, employees, and leadership teams. If you want to hear the full broadcast, which also featured information from Todd Logsdon, a partner in the Louisville office at Fisher and Phillips LLP, visit TRSA’s on demand learning center at www.trsa.org/ on demand. Finally, if you’d like a copy of the slides from the recent webinar, email podcasts attrsa.org, and we’ll send you a copy.

 

Thanks again to our sponsor, 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. And as always, make sure you subscribe, rate, and review our show on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Additionally, follow TRSA on Facebook at trsaorg, on Twitter at trsa, on LinkedIn at Textile Rental Services Association of America, and on Instagram attrsaorg.