MINNEAPOLIS — Now that Minnesota is set to dial COVID-19 restrictions all the way back, many employers are hoping for a return to the office. There's just one problem.
"Employers have just been left out of the equation," said Dr. Shantanu Nundy, a primary care physician and Chief Medical Officer at Accolade Health.
Through his work at Accolade, Dr. Nundy has helped companies navigate COVID Response Care, which is aimed at improving employee safety and support as they return to an in-person environment.
"With many employees working at home for more than a year, a lot of them are scared," Dr. Nundy said. "The most amount of people they've spent time with is something they can count on one or two hands."
But he says employers are also scared right now, for an often overlooked reason.
"There's a huge, huge legal part of this," Dr. Nundy said. "Just to give you a sense, every state has differing guidance on some of these (back-to-work) decisions, and so what you can do in one state is very different than the other. People are saying, 'Is this actually going to be enforced?'"
And while some states, like Minnesota, have made some updated guidance available to help employees and employers know their rights and requirements, Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance remains largely unchanged since the end of 2020. Dr. Nundy says the uncertainty has built rapidly since then, especially after the CDC issued major changes to its general recommendations for vaccinated Americans.
"I think that's the part that's missing for employers," Dr. Nundy said. "Folks can be in a small gathering without a mask on. But does that apply to a shared work/office space where there's six employees together? I think those are the questions people have."
Kent Erdahl: "Is that knowledge out there?"
Dr. Nundy: "You know, there's some evolving best practices but it's literally to the point where we'll see a press release or a news article and we'll start searching that article and say, 'Oh, it looks like JP Morgan is doing this or Salesforce is doing this. I mean, that, to me, as a doctor and someone who believes in the science, doesn't seem to be the best way that we could be spreading best practices."
Still, that doesn't mean there is a single set of best practices that will apply to every business.
"Look, we're not saying that the government has to tell employers what to do or anything like that," Dr. Nundy said. "It's more, provide a base level of evidence and a base level of guidance, so folks can decide within that how they want to operate."
In his recently published book, 'Care After COVID', Dr. Nundy makes the case that solving the problem will also take a larger reinvention of the healthcare system. In the meantime, he says businesses need some help feeling more confident about their return which, in turn, will also help their employees.
"That's my biggest advice to employers," Dr. Nundy said. "Focus on making people feel safe as much as them being safe, because safety is a feeling, it's an emotion. And then things will ease up and people will want to come back in and it will continue to evolve."