While COVID will continue to affect our workplaces for some time, we generally recommend not adding COVID policies to your handbook. Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to evolve, and federal and state laws related to the pandemic will continue to change as well. And as we’ve seen with OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard, courts can put employer obligations on hold (or resume their effective date) unexpectedly.
Instead of making changes directly to your employee handbook, we suggest incorporating COVID-related policy updates into a separate handbook addendum, or a packet of policies and documents given to each employee.
