Work Bubble Program: How To Keep Employees Safe Amid The Pandemic

With the growing COVID-19 cases fast affecting the business sector, we look into how companies can keep their businesses afloat—the safe way.

Apart from the negative impact on sales, the continuing coronavirus pandemic has paralyzed the business operations of many companies—mostly because a significant portion of the workforce has to be quarantined due to positive coronavirus infections.

While work-from-home arrangements are becoming the norm, companies that need people on hand to actually produce their products and services are negatively impacted when their employees are found to be infected.

Of Growing COVID-19 Cases and Understaffed Businesses

Many companies feel that they are in a conundrum. On one hand, their strict implementation of testing and quarantine protocols have prevented the spread of the virus. But on the other hand, the strict implementation has hampered their operations, especially when employees are found infected and have to be sent home, leaving the company short-handed.

Those companies who regularly conduct antigen testing of employees are reporting positive coronavirus infection rates as high as forty percent (40%) of the employee population. Thus, the common observation is that the more you test, the higher the infection rate of your workforce. And this leaves companies in a bind.

In reality, the culprit is not the strict testing procedures—it's that employees go home after work and are probably infected when they encounter other people outside the office, during their daily commute, or elsewhere. A couple of companies I know have found a way through this problem: by creating a "work bubble program" that allows the company to shield selected employees from contracting the coronavirus.

A Work Bubble Program, Explained

How does a Work Bubble Program work? By its very name itself, it involves asking employees to temporarily stay inside the company or in a strictly monitored location for a certain period of time. That way, companies can limit the risk of contracting the coronavirus, thus ensuring their employees' safety from infections in the workplace and in their homes.

The objective of the work bubble program is primarily (1) to ensure that there are enough company employees to run operations and (2) to protect the "locked-in" employees from being infected by the coronavirus. Although it sounds simple enough to implement, there are a number of protocols that need to be set up to ensure the success of the work bubble program.

Best Practices for a Work Bubble Program

Here are some of the best practices when implementing a work bubble program:

Proper Communication

Management should properly communicate the objectives of the work bubble program—including its pros and cons—to their teams to ensure employee "buy-in."

One of the most compelling pro reasons for implementing the program is that employees can continue to work without the fear of contracting the virus and avoid a "no work, no pay" situation. This is especially relevant since one of their greatest anxieties is that they will have no work when found to be infected so they hide their symptoms. And this results in more infections at work.

Enforcing Strict Protocols and House Rules

There have to be strict protocols before an employee can be accepted in the work bubble program, such as initial swabbing procedures (antigen or RT PCR testing).