Since Jav offices on the SMU campus and his work is directly tied to the decisions made there, his transition to working from home has been clear and somewhat organized. He's worked from home before so already has tools in place. They have had to lay off many hourly employees that work in the campus restaurants. But his job hopefully will be ok throughout this crisis, provided students will be coming back to some type of normal university life next August.
My job, however, has been a roller coaster of a stressful ride. When the schools closed for extra weeks, there were meetings about what we would do if someone were to get sick or if the county/state/fed government closed our office as a non-essential business. Ours is a good-ole-boy run industry and we have never been allowed to work from home. But our software guy set up all the salespeople and my boss, Donna, to work from home (Donna can do payroll from home). As the days went by and the news became more and more scary, it was awful to have to be the only one still heading out to work every day. I was told on Thursday 3/19 that we were hopefully going to be working from home starting 3/23.
The owner and son did not go for that plan because very few businesses in our industry had shut down and they didn't want to have to tell customers we were bailing for awhile. ( to say nothing of what it would do to our business for this year). I had quite a freak out moment (that I later regretted) and said that was irresponsible and I didn't understand why more office people couldn't work from home.
They set up split shifts, to avoid having too many people at work at one time. One week on working 3 to 5 days and one week off working from home. (Production still has to go in every day but I think they are splitting up also). I was scheduled to go in 3/24 to do payroll. That was the day Tarrant County issued their Stay At Home Emergency order. Little did we know that our owner and son had other plans - two of our big corporate customers, John Deere and Napa, had sent letters saying that since they were essential, all of their suppliers were under their umbrella and considered essential. But the owners did not tell us that, they just told us we had to keep working and I wasn't having it. The owner said if you weren't comfortable staying you could go home and I said I was heading home. The next day I was told the software guy set me up to work from home and I could come pickup my computer anytime.
At first this was challenging - it required some folks to scan things for me since I didn't have the actual paperwork. But I figured out 3/4 of my job could be done from home without anyone else having to do extra work. The CFO still seemed and seems put out that I demanded to work from home. So I'm sort of expecting the ultimatum that I either have to stick to the on again/off again work schedule or I'll be let go. I had to go in to run expense (utilities /insurance/freight) payments and decided I would go in early from 7 - 8 every morning to scan things I needed and keep the files updated. So now the only thing I am not still doing for my job is backup payroll every other week. I'm considering doing that now. But it depends on the virus, whether it's still considered high risk to venture out or not.
All of this has been so very stressful. My immediate boss has been very agreeable and understanding which I appreciate more than I can say. But her boss is the one that seems angry. I do not want to lose my job right now. So many people have lost theirs and are suffering. But I'm also angry that my owners seem more concerned about making huge corporate customers happy than caring about their employees. They have always been so caring and treated all of us like family I know it's not black and white, and that we can't afford to lose those huge customers and survive as a business. But I'm still sad and disappointed in the way the whole thing was handled.
Just hoping and praying that we both have our jobs at the end of this crazy time.
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