My employer has been great. We are still in business, and will likely be okay financially for at least the intermediate future, so that means they have the means to help out.
They sent everyone home when that looked like the right thing to do.
managers were instructed to
figure out how their staff could do their jobs from home.
if 1 isn’t possible, find other useful stuff for staff to do.
if 2 isn’t possible, or isn’t possible full-time, pay them anyway.
To facilitate (1) they bought laptops for everyone who didn’t have one, and helped out with purchases of office-style chairs and other accessories to make wfh comfortable. In some cases they let people take home monitors from the office.
We’ve had official announcements that they don’t plan to lay anyone off due to covid for the foreseeable future, and they instituted a new “paid time off code” for covid-related absences.
The whole WFH thing has gone surprisingly smoothly. At first we were worried about bandwidth, but that’s mostly been fine, and where it hasn’t been fine, it’s usually been a local problem. (Someone’s home service isn’t good.) My team is a little ahead of schedule, probably because no one has taken much vacation.
I work for a DoD contractor in medical support and research. My employer gave everyone 40 extra hours of sick leave on top of whatever they’ve accumulated. Other than that, for me it’s been business as usual, just from home rather than the office. There’s a lot of research scientists in the company and I don’t know what they’ve been doing the past two months, but that doesn’t affect me. Nobody has been laid off or furloughed; our salaries are all contractually guaranteed and the contract has no end date, so unless there’s sudden massive cuts to the military budget (yeah, right!), we’re all safe pretty much forever.
Pretty much every salaried employee has been “work from home” since late March. Even the factory folk. We staff folk have been working really, really long days until the plants came back up.
This is really, really, really awesome of my company. Not everyone has been productive during this period.
Most office people at my job have been working from home since about mid-March. Since I work for a muncipal government, there are definitely some field folks (police, fire, garbage, water/sewage treatment, etc…) who are still working as normal. Unfortunately they furloughed a bunch of parks and library people for a few months, and the rest of us are wondering when the next shoe will drop, as that’s not nearly enough to offset the expected budget shortfalls.
The good news is that they’re going to try and reassign as many people as possible to other departments, etc… and there’s a pretty generous leave policy w.r.t. COVID-19 in place as well.
I work for a pharma company in the San Francisco Bay Area; we went into a crisis mode a week before the regional lockdown started. We are in full production and testing, but with masks and social distancing; everyone who can work from home is doing so. Everyone coming on site has to pass a screening and temperature check at the gate, cloth masks are being distributed to all employees, and online ergonomic assessments are available, along with a budget for buying things like a desk chair, headset, or the like. The area has lifted some restrictions, but the company isn’t changing anything until Labor Day at the earliest.