I work for a wildlife care center (we take in injured and orphaned wildlife). We don’t get snow here, but if we did some people would need to go in to feed and tend the animals on site. We only have 5 paid employees, and rely heavily on volunteers. As the volunteer coordinator, I could work from home seeing who can make it in, but as the employee who lives closest to the facility, I would probably go in. Amusingly 4 of the 5 of us drive Subarus, and with the minor amount of snow we would get here, we’d probably all make it in. 
I work for a newspaper. We’ve got to crank one out each and every day, no matter what, and we’re expected to just get over it and show up if it’s just, you know, a solid dose of the fluffy white stuff. But the higher-ups aren’t entirely unsympathetic. A couple of years ago, we got some truly serious snow around here, so they were generous enough to put up the necessary personnel in a fairly nice hotel that’s close to our office, and one of the reporters who has four-wheel drive would ferry us back and forth as needed. I remember that stretch of time rather fondly, actually.
WHAT?!?! No lattes?!?!? Oh, HELL no!
At my current employer approximately 80% of people can work from home if necessary. The major exception is the mail room. If no one is there to open and scan the mail, then the processors have nothing to do. I am in the project world, so work from anywhere is pretty standard, I take my laptop home every day. For those who can work from home, there are no snow days. For those who can’t, if the company officially closes the site it’s a paid holiday for them. If the site is not officially closed, it’s come in or use PTO.
Very occasionally the weather gets bad enough that the entire organization is closed, with the exception of critical staff (they know who they are).
Otherwise people either get in their car and hope for the best, take annual leave time and stay home or telecommute.
I live in northern Canada, so we don’t have “snow days” up here. We just have days that it snows. You either show up to work or you get fired and move someplace where it doesn’t snow for eight months out of twelve.
If it was Snowmageddon and the Rapture combined I would still be required to come in. If it was a scheduled day off they don’t take it back but once it’s known that there will be a snow emergency no one is allowed to take off.
I don’t work any longer, but in Portland, the entire city shuts down for a couple of inches of snow. When I lived and worked in Anchorage, you showed up for work for anything under a foot. I only remember one day in the eleven years we lived there when we literally couldn’t get out of the driveway, let alone get to the office. It was a freak snow storm on St. Patrick’s Day that dumped over two feet of snow on the city. Even my Jeep would have been high-centered before I got to the street.
On the other hand, when I worked on the AFB for a contractor, the Air Force would shut down everything if there was more than about 3" predicted, and send everyone home. As a contractor, we didn’t have to follow suit, but for some reason always did. I got paid either way, so no skin off my nose.
The “official” rule is pretty much zero-tolerance for absence unless a state of emergency is declared for weather ( or the world splits in two )
Sometimes exceptions are granted on a case-by-case basis.
Unless there’s a power outage (which only happened once), I work from home on bad weather days. They encourage us to do so rather than try to go out and clutter up the icy roads with more vehicles. I work from home 2 or 3 days a week normally, so it’s no big deal.
I work from home most days now, so it wouldn’t matter, but my company is very relaxed about it - the employees have laptops and are required to take them home at night as part of our emergency plan. Since everyone pretty much has internet, they just tell people to work from home. If I’m in the office and just a thunderstorm is rolling in, my boss will tell me to head home early. I’m not sure about the warehouse folks, I’ll have to ask. We ship drugs and have someone available 24/7 to get out emergency orders.
I’m thinking the potential liability of requiring people to travel on bad roads is probably the tipping point.
StG
Sufficient snow is unlikely around San Francisco Bay.
I live in Boise, which is an island of better weather in the sea of frozen tundra known as ‘the rest of Idaho’. (We’re that way due to being in a protected valley, I gather.) This means that we know all about bad snow but never, in our opinion, actually experience it (especially in the past few years since we hardly get any snow at all now thanks to global warming). In the decades I’ve lived here I remember two days that the weather was bad enough that I swore constantly while driving in it. I still drove in it though - we don’t really have a protocol for snow days at my workplace. If somebody wants to skip work because of terrible weather that’s what vacation days are for.
We are pretty tolerant of “arrived at work an hour and a half late due to accidents on the freeway”, though.
In the DFW area it’s not snow, but ice storms that shut things down. Glaze ice on all the roads is amazingly treacherous for the inexperienced, and has even surprised our employees from up Nawth.
My company generously allows me to either show up, take vacation time, or lose pay. No time off for weather, period. My wife has a “absolutely must be there” job so I deliver us both to work, no matter what the roads are like.
In the past, I had begun to feel lonely since my son and I were the only two people in DFW who knew how to drive* on solid ice, but during the last storm I saw another guy who wasn’t stupid. Unfortunately he was in the opposite lane, so I didn’t get to meet him.
*they’re called “tire chains”.
I believe the protocol around here is to ‘hilariously overreact’. In fairness, due to the rarity of snow, most roads aren’t gritted and no-one’s geared up for it, but we got all of 2" in February, and around half the town was closed.
At my workplace I wound up with an unpaid day off, but a few of those who lived closer got picked up by the boss in a 4wd. I suspect that was about typical for the area; snow’s so rare many workplaces won’t really have a proper policy.
I just spent a week in Vermont, because my daughter (living / working up there) needed to go to Dartmouth (New Hampshire) for medical reasons.
Naturally it snowed that day. Not sure what the total accumulation was - 4ish inches or more - but it hit right before morning “rush”.
I called Dartmouth to ask if they would be open. I’m sure the person who answered the call thought I was hilarious.
To be fair: even though I had an SUV with all-wheel drive, the car had trouble handling the snow: I had given myself extra time to stop at one light, and wasn’t going all that fast… and the car WOULD NOT STOP - I finally came to a stop in the middle of the intersection. Fortunately, the car coming from the side street hadn’t been in a rush to get onto the road. The county road to where my daughter was, well, cars were moving very slowly… and I did not even attempt the unpaved, narrow, uphill road to where she was working - I called and someone drove her down.
The rest of the trip involved a lot of very careful driving over intermittently cleared county roads. When we got to New Hampshire, everything had been nicely plowed and we just had to be careful of lots of slushy piles. I think there was also a dramatic difference in how the two states were affected by the storm; the next day when we drive back, we went from gray skies and slush (on the NH side) to white skies and light snow the minute we crossed the river.
All in all, it would have been a good day to implement a “come in 2 hours late” policy - because even there in VT where they know about snow, and in what should have been an adequate vehicle, travel was pretty hazardous. I imagine snow tires and/or chains are much more common up there (I had rented the car in Virginia, where we panic at a quarter inch of slush).
I did have to drive up that unpaved road the next day - and was very glad I had not attempted it during the actual snowfall. It was a tricky balancing act between enough velocity to keep the car going uphill even when hitting a slippery patch, and going too fast and having that slippery patch land me in a ditch.
My Wife and I drive in snow a lot. A REAL LOT. Over the continental divide at 11,500 feet twice a day. Each of us.
First thing we do on a new car (we have to have AWD/4x4) is get rid of OEM tires. All season tires are ok unless you really deal with snow. We put on snow tires. Good ones. Bridgestone Blizzaks or Nokian Hakkapeliitta seem to be best.
We can work from home if need be, so there’s no need to shut down.
If a blizzard or freezing rain is en route midday, we’re told to leave. Happens two or three times a winter.
I went to school at Dartmouth, and we had folks who wore shorts all winter. Closing down on account of snow is to laugh.
AWD and high clearance SUVs don’t make cars stop. Tires make cars stop. That’s why everyone in Upper Valley has snow tires on their Priuses and Outbacks alike.
Just about everybody at my workplace can work from home two days a week. Just need laptop & VPN. For snow days, stay at home and do your work.
We’ve actually had more hurricane days because southeast US.
Yep. I had noted " I imagine snow tires and/or chains are much more common up there (I had rented the car in Virginia, where we panic at a quarter inch of slush)."
So the car almost certainly had standard “all season” tires; nobody down here puts snow tires on their cars (I remember my parents having snow tires when I grew up in Pennsylvania). And the entire road surface was covered in snow at that point. I’m sure the AWD helped where there was un-snowy road surface to grip, but not when all 4 tires were skating.
I expect the AWD helped the next day climbing that hill; the road had been plowed but there was still a fair bit of compacted snow. With AWD, my chances of finding bits of less-slick surface were doubled.
If I lived up there all winter, however, I’d definitely have better tires.