Who Has "Essential Staff" Category?

Caroliso

We are a nonprofit corporation in Massachusetts, education related, and ordinarily wouldn't have use for a category of "essential staff." However, with all the snow this year, including much that is requiring office closings or delayed openings, I started thinking about whether or not we want to use this concept. The idea for us would be that there would be a core group of staff, maybe one person in each administrative department, who would come in to keep essential functions running for those who want to come in, but anyone else would not be required to come in. It's important from a business perspective because we live on grants, and office closings with administrative services shut down when someone is ready to submit a grant proposal could be disastrous.

Does anyone outside of government and health care use this category? How does it work? Do you compensate people differently for being willing to come in on that basis?

Thanks.

marc

We are also a non-profit and rely heavily on grant funding.

If one staff person can come in, most likely all can. We had 6 1/2 feet of snow in the week after New Years - two early closings and two all day closings were the result. From a safety perspective, how can you require even core staff to come to work?

We would not close unless government offices and schools were closed. Even then, some of us had the vehicles and freedom to stay at work during early closings or to come to work when the office was otherwise closed.

What will you do when some of your core staff have children that cannot go to school and must be taken care of by a parent and the day care centers are closed?

My point is, just identifying core positions doesn't get those people into the office and make them productive.

Caroliso

Good questions, all, although my first response is these questions are valid for all companies, not just yours and mine, so how do government, hospital and public agencies handle these questions? They all have an "essential staff" category who are "required" to come in during emergency weather conditions.
I'm guessing the first step is to identify core positions; the second step is to offer incentives that would entice required number of these people to show up, and assumes they would therefore be productive.
Our practice is to close when there is a statewide and county wide emergency declared and the governor asks everyone to stay off the road. This happens infrequently, in fact only twice in my 13 years with our company. That instance is pretty clear. Schools close much more frequently, and this would not be our benchmark. You raise an interesting point about government agencies AND schools combined, that's worth pursuing.
Not so clear are days when the conditions are bad but folks can press on if they "have" to. What winds up happening is the research staff who can, who have laptops and can work from home, do so; the administrative staff, most of whom cannot take work home, are forced to come in, or take a personal or sick day if they deem it too difficult to come in from their locations, or have to stay home with kids who have no school.
Maybe this is as good as it gets, just doing HR daydreaming in my "free" time and wondering if there was a way that equalized things a little more between administrative and research staff. From the response level to this question, I'm guessing the answer is "no" but if anyone has anything else to add, please do!

Thanks.