As An Employer, This Is How You Should Communicate Your Vaccination Requirements

What’s the best way for businesses to communicate new vaccine requirements to employees? 

Answer by Kara Govro, Chief HR Legal Expert, on Quora: 

Communications depends on the structure of the workforce. If you’re mostly remote and you don’t think this will ruffle too many feathers, a message on a company-wide Slack channel may suffice. At this point you’re really just telling employees that this is coming down the pipeline. It will give the unvaccinated some time to think about what they want to do, and those who have been on the fence may decide to just go get vaccinated before the ETS is even rolled out.

If your workforce isn’t online, or shifts are spread throughout the day, you could ask managers to relay this information when they see each of their employees, but I think because of the sensitivity of the topic and the potential for strong negative reactions that your managers may not know how to deal with – or might engage or agree with, creating even more escalation – that this message is probably best delivered by Human Resources or people at the C-suite level. And in some situations that may mean you may need to resort to posters around the workplace or notices that are issued with paystubs – whatever method you usually use to communicate with your entire staff.

President Biden likely did this to give employers who want to mandate vaccination some cover. They can essentially blame the government for the requirements that some employees won’t like. And for workforces that have very low levels of vaccination, that may be a useful part of their messaging. Really, it’s going to be part of anyone’s messaging unless they already required vaccination.

Pretty much any time an employer rolls out a novel policy, they should be explaining WHY they did it. It helps with buy-in and reduces follow up questions and arguments.

This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

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This article was originally published by Forbes on October 19, 2021.