Policy on paying employees during disaster, emergency closure, etc.

thorn

Would anyone be willing to share what policy and/or procedures are in place for salary continuation in the event of a disaster (i.e. natural or any type of disaster that might close down your business for more than a week)... Does your policy state how long payroll would continue, and do you allow use of PTO if employee has it available??

IT HR

To be honest with you I don't remember how the policy read prior to Huricane Katrina but I can tell you what my previous company did during this time. The company had numerous locations that were damaged and needed repairs, causing them to be closed for more than 1 month, leaving over 1000 people without places to work.  The company set up a toll free number for all of these employees to call in and let them know where they had relocated to.  They paid every employee that was temporarily without work for one month (hourly and salaried).  When the employees called into the hotline, the corporate office tried to pair them up with another location in the area they had relocated to, to get them back to work (the company has locations in most of the states around the country and most had at least a few vacant positions).  Although these closed locations lost some of the business they had before the hurricane, many of the customers still needed to be serviced so the neighboring locations that were not effected had to pick up the slack.  These locations were able to add more employees to their staff then normal because of this extra work.  The management team of these locations did the best they could to help the displaced employees find temporary housing so they could work at the new locations.  The corporate office set up a adopt-an-employee program so that they could help provide basic items to an employee that had lost everything.  It was pretty amazing to see the generosity of many of my employees.  Many of these employees live paycheck to paycheck but would come to me and say they could only afford to give $5 and ask if that was ok.  Then I had other employees that gave hundreds of dollars in gift cards so that these affected employees could get clothes, cosemetics, bed linens, basic household items.   

It is really hard to come up with a policy that will meet the demands of all of the different natural disasters that can occur.  I think you have the basic policy about closures (according to your state law) that talks about who will make the decision to close, when it will be made, how it will be communicated to all of the employees (do you set up a weather hotline for employees to call and see what the status is before the workday), and what you will do if the weather turns bad after the work day has already started (I have seen many policies where if the employer closes early they will pay the hourly employee for 4 hours or what the employee worked, whichever is more and then pay the salaried employee for the entire day).  Then I would put something in the policy about company reserves the right to make changes to this policy depending on the severity of the natural disaster and the amount of time the establishment will be closed. 

I heard about lots of employers paying employees for weeks on end after Katrina.  When the company has the ability to do so, I think paying the employee and assisting as much as possible goes a long way to show the employees that you really do care about them, especially during a disaster like Katrina.