Emergency readiness survey results (COVID-19)

Leapsome ran a quick and non-exhaustive survey of HR professionals to try and determine how companies deal with emergencies, with a focus on the current situation caused by the spread of Coronavirus.

Due to the rapidly evolving nature of the situation, we are presenting results as quickly as possible. That means the number of responses is relatively small. Despite that, it is our hope that the results will help shed some light into what the situation is and how it’s being approached.

The following results are taken from responses by 31 companies, located in Germany, collected between Tuesday 10 March and Thursday 11 March 2020.

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Some practical tips from the community on how to handle the situation in your workplace:

• If you're considering going fully remote, you could run a trial-day to test if it is feasible for the whole company to work from home. This can help identify and address any issues as early as possible.
• Ensure your employees have what they need to be productive if required to work from home. For example, allow them to expense a taxi to be able to transport their workstation home (e.g. monitors, laptop stands, keyboards, desk chairs, etc).
• Similarly, ensure that your company has the right tools in place to facilitate remote work. Live chat and video conferencing such as Slack and Zoom are a necessity. There is an excellent crowdsourced great guide on best-practices that can be found at https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/remote.‍
• If you're not ready to go fully remote, you could introduce a rotation program to determine which employees come into the office on which days so that you reduce the density of people in the office at any one time and increase the distances between each employee's desk.
• You could ask all employees to always take their laptop home with them in case there is a need to lock-down the office at short notice.
• You could also increase the frequency of full-service cleaning of your office space.

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Some guides produced by all-remote companies:

• https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work
• https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote

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Useful resources for monitoring the situation:

• https://www.cdc.gov
• https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en
• https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
• https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd