Pandemic: Planning for Your Employee Vaccination Policy

With COVID-19 vaccines becoming more widely available and with overall lower virus infection rates, many employers are discussing and making plans to have their teams soon re-enter their physical office/workplace spaces.

Yet employers face a bigger question at the same time: what kind of employee vaccination plan should they put in place? Should employers make vaccination mandatory, voluntary or via a hybrid plan based on employee roles and related factors? Plus, what are the risks to employee health and well-being with any of these options?

All told, legal and public health experts at the moment suggest significant uncertainty remains around the issue of employer-mandated vaccination.

With litigation and state legislative action likely to get underway soon on this question, it may be prudent for most employers to wait and see how things evolve on these fronts before making firm decisions in regard to vaccination plans for employees.

This is especially so since most Americans (beyond the elderly, essential workers and related priority vaccination groups) likely will not have access to vaccines until this spring or summer.

At the same time, to help with your planning process in developing an employee vaccination plan, one of the key steps will be to determine if there is a business necessity for your employees (or employees in specific roles) to be vaccinated. When thinking about and creating a vaccination policy, it should:

• Allow for certain exceptions
• Be job-related
• Be consistent with business necessity

If you move to implement a mandatory vaccine policy, for example, it must include exceptions for employees who: 1) cannot be vaccinated because of any pre-existing conditions or 2) have sincerely held religious beliefs.

With the ongoing and evolving complexity on this issue for employers, please do not hesitate to contact us at impactHR for any assistance we can provide: email us at [email protected] or call 443-741-3900.