how should we handle remote work and extreme weather?
I work for a small nonprofit, and most of our employees telework full-time. They live all over the state, some in urban and some in rural areas. We have been experiencing regular major extreme events (fires, floods, storms, etc.) that have substantial impacts on the team members personally and also cut them off from access to the internet (whether due to outages or safety issues). This generally impacts some staff members more than others based on their geography. Aside from the personal impacts (which can be very intense and potentially devastating, depending on the event), we also have staff unable to work for increasingly long periods.
In the past, the organization would sporadically foot the bill for the time when employees were impacted, but there is no specific policy. With the increasing frequency and duration of these events due to climate change, we need a policy that balances compassion with our budget and treats all employees equitably. We are mostly grant funded and cannot charge paid leave to the grants, so floating weeks at a time for multiple employees multiple times a year is becoming increasingly difficult. That said, I don’t love exhausting PTO for events that aren’t the employee’s fault. I also think we need some objective criteria as to what constitutes a disaster (e.g. regular power outages vs wildfire evacuation), but there are so many variations of events that it’s hard to develop one. Have you seen examples policies to address these situations, or do you have any suggestions?
Great question, and I have not — so let’s throw this one out to readers to weigh in on in the comment section.
#handle #remote #work #extreme #weather #Manager
