Overview
The following resources have been collaboratively assembled in conjunction with the members of the Cornell Center for Innovative Hospitality Labor and Employment Relations (CIHLER). Please jump to the end to see how to share and how to contribute,
COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge, particularly impacting the hospitality sector. Restaurants, bars, event firms, and hotels, along with other travel and entertainment resources, have seen drastically reduced business and/or been ordered to close. Many have also taken the decision to close or dramatically alter their business profile to protect their community and employees. This publication is meant to be a living document for the community to gather together information and help share best practices throughout this crisis.
Note that this document does not constitute official legal or medical or other such professional advice, and parties should continue to rely on those professions to confirm approaches specific to their circumstances
Overview
Hospitality issues
Current Government Statements
Protecting the community
Protecting employees
Legal resources
Business strategies
Financial
Insurance
Cash flow
U.S. Small Business Administration
Disaster Assistance Loans
Industry impact
Managing during the crisis
Managing for post crisis
Implementing delivery or pick up services
Tools
Policies
Working from home
Strategies
Tools for remote workers
Tools for front line employees
Management Resources
Business resources
Announced corporate policies
Case Studies/Examples
Baseline information
About the virus
Prevention
Symptoms
Research
How it spreads
About the current status
Contacts
Where to find this document on the web
How to Share This Document
How To Contribute
Hospitality issues
Current Government Statements
As of APRIL 7, 2020 - Full statements by each state here
As of MARCH 26, 2020 UPDATED VIA NY TIMES HERE
As of March 20, 2020, here are the following restrictions in place.
Protecting the community
- Hospitality is about getting together, yet the primary recommended mode of slowing/containing the virus is Social distancing - reducing contacts and keeping at least 2m away from people
- Re-engineering operations to comply with health mandates
- Partnering with state/local governments and industry associations to communicate (and establish?) prevention and management strategies
Protecting employees
- Worker risk classification per OSHA:
- Medium Exposure Risk: Medium exposure risk jobs include those that require frequent and/or close contact with (i.e., within 6 feet of) people who may be infected with SARS-CoV-2, but who are not known or suspected COVID-19 patients. In areas without ongoing community transmission, workers in this risk group may have frequent contact with travelers who may return from international locations with widespread COVID-19 transmission. In areas where there is ongoing community transmission, workers in this category may have contact be with the general public (e.g., in schools, high-population-density work environments, and some high-volume retail settings).
- Lower Exposure Risk (Caution) Lower exposure risk (caution) jobs are those that do not require contact with people known to be, or suspected of being, infected with SARS-CoV-2 nor frequent close contact with (i.e., within 6 feet of) the general public. Workers in this category have minimal occupational contact with the public and other coworkers.
- Note employees rights
- Telecommuting
- Flextime
- Staggered shifts
- Workplace housekeeping practices
- Regularly disinfect work surfaces
- Increase ventilation rates
- Install plastic barriers between work spaces
- Manage social distancing at work
- Restrict the number of employees that can be on-site
- Ensure and maintain 6ft of separation between all employees
- Discourage employees from using others’ equipment and tools
- Masks: availability, practicality
- Is it right to consume supply needed by healthcare/etc workers?
- Pros and cons of using cloth masks.
- Sick leave policies, practices, granting and backfilling
- Relax policies that require a healthcare provider’s note for individuals who call-in sick?
- Permit employees to stay home to take care of sick family members?
- Employees with coronavirus
- Note: See OSHA’s guidance for jobs classified at lower, medium, or high/very high exposure risk
- What do to if an employee tests positive
- Employees in quarantine due to exposure (family or other)
- Employees with other illness
- Remote health care
- Caregiver strategies - schools closed, meal support programs are closed
- Unemployment benefits finder
- Job search resources
- Education and training resources
- Resources employees can access for financial support
Legal resources
Business strategies
Financial
Insurance
Cash flow
- Industry targeted programs
- Forward selling gift certificates
U.S. Small Business Administration
Industry impact
Managing during the crisis
- Some hospitality firms are leveraging their staff and facilities to become community resources
- There is discussion that hotels may be used for quarantine
- There may be cases where (eg) hotels can be centers for community services such as food pick up or delivery, parcels, cleaning, or other ways to partner with local business to support their work from home employees
- Housing homeless
- Keeping staff safe during this time
- Commuting may expose staff to additional risk given that many workers use public transit
- At work, social distancing is difficult.
- Staff feeling sick need to be able to call off / go home
- Note this could include non-coronavirus concerns, anxiety, or caregiver responsibilities
- Concerns here include that pressures on staff could impact their wellness and community wellness
- What are best practices here? Eg using masks may also divert supplies from other front line workers
- You may need specialists for cleaning and medical to keep staff/guests safe and contain liability
- Directly dealing with the virus is in the highest risk OSHA category
- Pros/Cons of using fabric masks
Managing for post crisis
Implementing delivery or pick up services
- Delivery or pick up services can leverage capacity while maintaining better social distancing
- Delivery may be difficult or impractical to implement if staff do not have access to vehicles.
- The logistics of orchestrating delivery networks (eg optimizing routing) may be new to businesses.
- Staff communications issues may increase
Tools
- Popular third party services to leverage
- Grubhub
- Doordash
- Instacart
- Postmates
- UberEats
- If your staff will do delivery, Waze or Google Maps may be sufficient to handle routing a small number of deliveries, or where the delivery area, or order volume are well defined.
- If staff are doing three deliveries or less, they will be returning back to the main location often enough that there may be minimal benefit in more sophisticated routing
Policies
- Mandatory ServSafe training/retraining
- “Contactless delivery” or “contactless pickup”
- For pickup
- Identify the pickup area for all orders
- Have gloved and masked staff take the order out
- If not using a third party service, note that you require contactless delivery, and ask where they would like the delivery left and how you can text them that it is there
- Staff should be gloved and masked
- Staff returning from a delivery to inside the site must leave shoes, gloves, masks at the door, wash for 20 seconds, and put on new gloves and masks for the next time out
Working from home
Many front line hospitality workers can of course not work remotely. Some management can, and some of those may yet choose to be in person when their employees are. This section summaries strategies and resources.
Strategies
Tools for remote workers
- An alternative: www.daily.co as there is no software install
- Note for 1:1 or smaller calls, consider having a primary service with several back up services as various networks may experience quality issues.
- Slack, WhatsApp, and Google Hangouts all have call/video tools
- For communication for desk workers:
- Slack has a number of add-ons to enable things such as automating regular status meetings. Eg one called the Howdy bot https://howdy.ai/faq.html
- Calendaring. The following are some examples that will find a spare slot on everyone’s calendar: calendly, doodle, x.ai, oliv.ai, assistant.to
- Some additional (free/freeish) resources https://openforbusiness.org/
- Of note: some organizations are hitting their VPN capacity (VPN is how you can access your corporate network remotely). CloudFlare is a reputable provider of hosted VPN, among others. Your IT team will likely need to be involved if you need this.
Tools for front line employees
Help for front line workers facing very different/changing work loads and remote or partially remote management
- General communication apps - WhatsApp (messaging, calling, video); Telegram (messaging, calling); Viber (calling, messaging), Skype (calling, messaging)
- Employee communication - Beekeeper, Dynamic Signal, Retail Zipline
- Shift management - Harri, When Labs, 7Shifts
- Video recording tools - Vidyard, Screencastify
- Mass texting tools - list, list
Management Resources
Many firms are assembling resource kits to help management put in place and communicate plans. Please share helpful tools in this regard.
- Template for communication from YouExec https://youexec.com/coronavirus-covid-19-employee-management-kit-presentation-p6v76r9nxa
- Office of Personnel Management Guidance for Shutdown Furloughs
- List of Outplacement companies and vendors on the SHRM website
Getting Back to Work
For some insights into work in the time of COVID-19...
https://www.warechassociates.com/expertise/ideas-inspiration/work-in-the-time-of-covid-accelerating-the-spread-of-fow
Business resources
A number of local, regional, and federal governments are introducing business support measures. Work in progress, please add
Announced corporate policies
Case Studies/Examples
A few key examples highlighting impact, learnings, approaches especially from early affected regions
Baseline information
There are a number of sources of baseline information growing daily. A few key valuable sources will be highlighted here.
About the virus
Prevention
Symptoms
Research
How it spreads
It can be difficult to visualize the potentially exponential spread of viruses, and why social distancing and other such tools are so valuable. Here are several
About the current status
Contacts
Doc authors contacts and other key contacts to come here
Where to find this document on the web
How to Share This Document
- Use one or more of the links in the above section
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How To Contribute
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Please click here to join the slack channel or cut and paste this link into your browser:
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