Business owners often need to make important decisions. Some of those decisions are much tougher than others.
Consider the case of a small family-owned business with about 30 employees. The manager and her daughter tested positive for COVID-19 breakthrough cases.
Initially, you feel secure knowing most of the employees have been vaccinated, so the likelihood of serious illness or death is greatly reduced. You concern becomes your employees who may become asymptomatic carriers. What if they bring the virus home and infect a high-risk loved one? You need to make important decisions, and time is of the essence.
One option would be to shut down operations and have all employees tested. Once the results are in, determine at what level you could operate with the employees who tested negative. For those who test positive, most would be back within three weeks.
Most business owners cannot imagine shutting down for up to 30 days. That decision could be expensive, devastating, and some businesses would not survive.
You could conduct business as usual, advise the staff of possible exposure and recommend testing as soon as possible. This option may allow the virus to spread. Staffers with high-risk loved ones will not want to work in this environment. This could be damaging to employee morale. Is there another option?
Because most of your employees are vaccinated, could you operate normally, and just test employees if they become symptomatic? Would this be the least disruptive and most profitable decision?
What decision would you make?
