Does your policy support or stress your employees?

Death affects us in different ways. As much as we may think we understand someone else’s grief following the loss of a loved one, we can never really know how they feel. Many factors go into the way we experience grief. Our relationship to the individual, the circumstances of their death, the last memory we have of that person, the things we said or didn’t say to them before they were gone, what we believe others expect from us after the death. As an employer, does your institution’s bereavement policy bring needed support to the grieved or does it add stress to an already difficult time? Consider a few aspects of your bereavement policy to ensure it works for both your institution and your employees.

Number of Days in Paid Status

For most employers, the number of days of paid bereavement leave depends on the relationship of the employee to the deceased. More time is given to close relatives like parents, spouses, children, and siblings, with less time offered to more distant relations like uncles, aunts, and cousins. But families are complicated. What about relatives that live in the employee’s home? What about in-laws and step-relatives? If an employee’s spouse loses a parent and needs to make arrangements, it seems likely that the employee would be involved in those arrangements and would need the same amount of time as if it were their own parent.

While lines do need to be drawn somewhere, consider whether widening the circle of relatives for whom the employee is allowed longer bereavement leave causes any real detriment to the institution. An employee who is granted sufficient time away will be more productive when they return to work.

Timeframe for Taking Bereavement Leave

In the United States, it is common for funerals and other services or memorials for the deceased to happen within several days or a couple weeks of the death. Common, but not absolute. The circumstances of the individual’s death may require a delay in mourning rituals. Weather could play a factor in fulfilling the decedent’s wishes. A pandemic could prevent family from coming together right away. If your policy imposes a time limit by which bereavement leave needs to be taken, consider whether that limit allows enough flexibility for the employee. A two-week limit to take leave is a pretty short period of time. The weather is not likely to change much in two weeks if it’s January in New York. Offering employees a month or even six months can help them make decisions without undue pressure.

Does your policy require the employee to take all the leave consecutively? That, too, could put undue pressure on the grieved. If your policy allows five days of leave, it may be more helpful to allow the employee to divide that time up as they need it. An employee who feels supported in their time of need will likely be a more dedicated employee in the long run.

Documentation

Does your policy require that the employee turn in an obituary or other proof of loss? If so, why? Trust isn’t given, it is earned. Yes, there may be a few people who come up with phantom relatives or friends in order to get a day off. But do you really need to put your supervisors in a position of policing bereavement leave? Just because someone turns in an obituary for a sweet old lady who died last week, doesn’t mean that lady was really their aunt. Trust employees to be honest and do the right thing. The employees who need the time will be grateful that the process for taking leave was easy.

The COVID-19 Mandate Question

To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Sorry for the Shakespeare reference, but Hamlet’s soliloquy has application to every campus this year: Should campuses mandate COVID vaccinations for students? For faculty and staff (employees)?

As this debate wages on, I’ve begun daydreaming in my endless Zoom meetings and webinars. I’m having flashbacks of my college literature lectures on how Shakespeare creates a balance with the first six words that Hamlet utters. As Hamlet ponders life and death, he asks which of the two alternatives is nobler, whether to suffer the cruelties of fate silently or to put up a fight against the misfortunes of life that afflict one. This soliloquy’s dramatic purpose is to explain Hamlet’s procrastination in carrying out his purpose, and the mental torture and anguish Hamlet feels if he does not.

As we grapple with the COVID-19 vaccination question, ought we remain steadfastly committed to our purpose to keep our campuses safe? Should we mandate the COVID vaccines as a means to assure our communities? If we don’t, what will happen? Of what great consequence?

The question to mandate the vaccine dominates college plans to shift back from remote to in-person instruction and from remote working to hybrid or fully on campus. Some colleges have held vaccination clinics to get students and employees immunized before they leave for the summer. Many colleges now see that the only way to return to normal and get back to campus is through a required vaccination program as the answer. The goal is to help build confidence that students, faculty and staff will be safe on campus.

I am not a lawyer, and I am not making a legal argument. But we do look to federal, state, and local authorities and the law--Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC)--for guidance to inform our decision-making.

First, protecting the privacy rights of our students and employees is of the utmost importance. We treat COVID-19 testing, temperature screening results, reports of symptoms, contact tracing, vaccination, or declinations as confidential medical records stored separately under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

But what happens to the prescreening for COVID-19 when the benefits diminish as rates of vaccination increase? Our campus policies need to be consistent and communicated clearly. Some states mandate temperature screening before work shifts, while the CDC recommends the continued utilization of prescreening.

With OSHA in mind, we have a duty to keep our communities free of recognized hazards, and we can consider the COVID-19 virus a danger or a risk to our communities. In so doing, if we adopt a policy that mandates all students and employees must receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the policy must have express medical and religious exemptions. The medical exemption stems from the ADA, which prohibits discrimination against individual medical conditions and requires us to provide individuals with health conditions a “reasonable accommodation.” The religious exemption is protected by The Civil Rights Act of 1964. If you choose to mandate vaccines as a condition of employment, adverse reactions are OSHA recordable events.

Other questions to work out if you decide to mandate. Is there a blanket policy that all employees need to work regardless of vaccination status? Is letting the employee work from home a “reasonable accommodation”? What accommodations will you allow for students? If students don’t comply, are they barred from residence, classes, or entirely from campus? Will you provide paid time off for employees to receive and recover from the vaccine?

One last Hamlet reference. Whatever you decide to do, there will be “slings and arrows” of those who believe mandating the vaccine is an assault on their liberties and others who will think you haven’t done enough to keep them safe if you don’t.

Please keep a watchful eye on the Chronicle’s “List of Colleges That Will Require Students or Employee to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19.” Often our best lessons are those we learn from our sister institutions.

I wish you well as you grapple with these questions on your campus, and I am confident you will find the best solution to keep your community safe. Be well.

What It Means to Have an Effective Policy Program

Have you ever written a policy that took hours of research, conversations, and meetings and years to get approved? Then, months or even years are dedicated to implementation and operationalizing the policy. Program evaluation can take place at various stages of the policy process to assess progress, milestones, and data amongst other things. Then what? When do you evaluate your policy and related programs and how?

The most common stage for program evaluation to take place is the evaluation and termination stage, when policies are evaluated against how successful they were at meeting their objectives (Fischer, Miller, & Sidney, 2007). Program evaluations focus on the inputs (resources) and outputs because program implementations are meant to be successful and require resources, which are increasingly scarce. Focusing on the level of resources used against the outcomes is important to funders. In other words, what did we get for our money? Over the years, evidence-based reporting has increased in popularity amongst public and nonprofit sectors (Emerson, 2009). Organizations need to show apparent, demonstrated and proven effectiveness. Apparent effectiveness is the short-term result, indicating, through documentation, the program is being utilized (Emerson, 2009). Demonstrated effectiveness refers to measuring the impact of the program (Emerson, 2009). Lastly, proven effectiveness, a scientifically proven measurement of a program’s success (Emerson, 2009). Both demonstrated and proven effectiveness utilize a third party evaluator to gauge the effectiveness (Emerson, 2009).

After our last policy implementation, we regrouped with our customers and discussed areas for continued refinement, improvement, and revisions. Even though we sought input and held focus groups prior to implementation, we still had opportunity to improve.

As you prepare your next policy implementation, think ahead to how you evaluate your program. Can you deliver evidence-based reporting? Can you demonstrate the public policy need was met? To find out, engage with your stakeholders and customers before, during, and after to seek feedback. If data is available to help evaluate, utilize that as well.

References

• Emerson, J. (2009). But does it work? How to best assess program performance. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 29-30.
• Fischer, F., Miller, G. J., & Sidney, M. S. (2007). Handbook on public policy analysis. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Articles on topics that may affect your organization’s policies

As we continue the fall semester, the Blog Committee would like to share some of the articles we’ve been reading that relate to policy administration in higher education.

• Class Notes: The gender poverty gap, COVID-19’s impact on college students, and more
  By Ember Smith and Richard V. Reeves, The Brookings Institution, Sept. 9, 2020
• A Perception Problem About Free Speech
  By Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 29, 2020
• University of California must stop all use of SAT and ACT in admissions, judge orders
  By Michael Burke, Ed Source, Sept. 1, 2020
• Accommodations in the Time of COVID
  By Nancy Gunzenhauser Popper, Talent Management and HR, Aug. 31, 2020
• UW System: Registration is now open for national public summit on preventing sexual harassment in higher education
  WisBusiness.com, Sept. 29, 2020
• 4 COVID-era Cybersecurity Threats CISOs are Confronting
  By Matt Zalaznick, University Business, Aug. 20, 2020
• California Bill Likely Conflicts with New Title IX Regulation
  By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Education Dive, Aug. 28, 2020

Make sure your policy library has only what it needs

Organizations develop policies and procedures to guide operations and behavior.  Policies direct organizations on what needs to be done and how.  But how do we decide what policies are necessary?  As policy administrators, we are asked to write or implement a policy, and it is our responsibility to confirm that the policy accomplishes something, and that a policy is the best way to achieve success.  Organizations implement policies to avoid difficult conversations, to course-correct challenging groups, or to resolve an isolated incident that may never occur again. To avoid publishing an unnecessary policy, first, ask yourself if the issue is essential and if it needs clarification.

The importance is subjective.  As policy administrators, we must help our colleagues identify the need for a policy and procedure and determine how to include the important and most practical information for users.  We want to avoid issuing policies merely to replace difficult conversations.  For example, if a campus department wants to eliminate hard copy invoices, do we need a policy, or can we accomplish this goal with a conversation?

Complex issues need clarification.  Is your organization subject to new legislation?  We cannot expect every person in our organization to research and comprehend the law.  Policies are a mechanism to interpret, shorten, and add the “why” and “how” tailored to the organization.

Certain issues have a major impact on the readers and the organization. Personnel, financial, health, and safety are common policy topics and are easily identified as necessary policies.  However, the remaining potential policies should inform readers with clear communication

Creating policies for all topics results in overload, and people will ignore them.  Never write/implement a policy “just to have one” or “because it seems like a good idea.”  Align the policy with the strategic objectives of the organization.  Ensure the policy accomplishes something, and it will be read.  Keep the policy concise.