Kahana & Feld has assembled tips and guidance for employers to consider for reopening the workplace. This part addresses general business issues. Part 1 addresses other labor and employment matters.

Protecting Company Assets

  • Create and circulate a comprehensive remote work policy that addresses concerns about maintaining and safeguarding your company’s trade secrets and confidential information such as customer lists, proprietary forms, sensitive financial information, etc.
  • Ensure that any employees who have been let go return all company-issued devices and ensure that confidential information and company trade secrets are returned. If any confidential or trade secret information is on the employee’s personal devices, have a protocol to ensure that it is removed.
  • Determine whether employees who have been terminated are working for competitors.
  • Ensure that new employees purge themselves of materials from former employees that can be considered a trade secret.
  • Your employees may not have secured Internet and may be susceptible to cyber criminals. Provide your employees with warnings to safeguard against cyber-attacks. 

Contracts

  • Review you contract for force majeure provisions.
  • Ensure that notice requirements are met.
  • Open the lines of communication to mitigate potential losses.
  • Evaluate whether one party’s notice of invoking the force majeure clause can trigger a force majeure event downstream (i.e. suppliers or customers).
  • Keep up to date on governmental restrictions and announcement, which may impact contractual commitments.

Communications to Third Parties

  • Establish and communicate clear protocol for access to the workplace as well as new rules that impact them.
  • Review and amend agreements with vendors, suppliers, cleaning services, etc. as appropriate to ensure they will agree to comply with local, state, and federal law.

Insurance Coverage

  • Tender as early as possible. Even if you have doubts about whether an insurance policy provides coverage for your loss, there is no harm in tendering the claim. The worst-case scenario is that your insurance carrier will deny coverage but will provide a coverage letter that details the rationale for the denial.
  • Look into obtaining the following coverages: Errors & Omissions (E&O); Directors & Officers (D&O); Business Interruption; Event Cancellation; Travel Insurance; Employment Practices Liability; and sufficient Commercial General Liability.
  • Revise information technology policies to reflect remote work hardware, software, and support.

Listen to our webinar Back to Basics: Considerations for Reopening the Workplace.