President Joe Biden's federal vaccine mandate will put new recordkeeping requirements on businesses and may create problems if employees refuse to comply.
President Joe Biden's plan to require vaccination or weekly COVID-19 testing has many unknowns and troubling scenarios for employers.
The upcoming federal rule mandates businesses with 100 or more employees require their workers to be vaccinated or have weekly COVID-19 tests. It's unknown whether the rule will apply to remote workers, but there's an expectation among experts that it might, because Biden's goal is to raise vaccination rates overall.
Suppose, for instance, a high-performing, sales record-busting employee, rejects vaccination and testing? Will this employer have to fire the employee for defying the federal vaccine mandate?
There's no answer to this question or many others, according to HR experts. And it may be a while before President Biden's federal vaccine mandate plan can begin. Legal challenges by governors and organizations are expected, which may delay or kill the president's plan. But HR departments may still have to get ready.
Businesses may need systems to manage vaccinations and testing. Enterprise HR vendors typically have systems that allow employees to upload and record documents, including proof of vaccination. But these HR information systems aren't necessarily used by smaller firms of up to 1,000 or so employees.
"They can't afford that in most cases," said Brian Kropp, chief of research in the Gartner HR practice.
The smaller employers may have bare-bones HR capabilities or nothing more than spreadsheets to manage their personnel records, Kropp said. That may spur a response from HR vendors to fill the need for recordkeeping.
"I think there's a real vendor opportunity," he said.
Employers may also link vaccination and testing records to building security systems, Kropp said. If employees, for instance, haven't been vaccinated or their testing is out of date, they may be denied access to the building, he said.
Vaccinated workforce saves money
Kropp believes, for the most part, businesses will be happy with Biden's order because a vaccinated workplace costs less and is more productive.
Are you going to be willing to fire that high-performing sales employee who outperforms all of their other peers by a magnitude of three?
Brian KroppChief of research in the Gartner HR practice
"They realize the value of a vaccinated workforce in terms of decreased absenteeism, decreased healthcare costs," Kropp said. It also means they can reopen workplaces, he said. "A vaccinated workforce is highly valuable to them."
To that point, Delta Air Lines Inc. recently announced a $200 a month surcharge on unvaccinated employees who use the firm's healthcare plan. It said the average COVID-19 hospital cost was $50,000.
Nonetheless, a federal vaccine mandate poses problems.
"Are you going to be willing to fire that high-performing sales employee who outperforms all of their other peers by a magnitude of three?" Kropp said. It's not known whether an employer would do that. But the mandate does remove a competitive risk factor for those firms that already require vaccination, he noted.
Biden's order requires the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to draft a vaccine mandate. Until that arrives and the legal questions are settled, employers are in the dark.
"There are more questions than answers," said David Lewis, president and CEO of OperationsInc, an HR consulting firm in Norwalk, Conn. "And the biggest question right now is, should I even be worrying about this?"
Legal challenges will derail parts
Lewis pointed to the planned legal challenges and said he expected that some, if not all, of these challenges "are going to derail, in part at least, this proposed guideline." The federal vaccine manadate announcement is "more of a direction until the questions are settled," he said.
Nonetheless, a vaccine mandate will create issues for HR managers, Lewis said. The recordkeeping, including weekly test results, "is pretty nightmarish," he said.
The mandate means employers will have to communicate their intent to new hires to comply with the corporate vaccine mandate and make it part of the onboarding process, Lewis said.
Some organizations already require vaccinations, but it is mostly by those that do so for specific reasons, such as food processing safety, or just believe it's the right thing to do, according to Lewis.
Biden's order alleviates the need for employers "to have to be bold" about requiring vaccination, Lewis said.
"It is a lot easier to go to your employees and say you have to be vaccinated because of the president," he said.
Brian Weinthal, an employment attorney at Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella, P.C. in Chicago, said, "The debate is going to be over whether the executive branch has the authority without a statute from Congress to take this kind of overwhelming sweeping or broad action."
Time to start preparing
Still, Weinthal is telling clients to start preparing.
Preparation could begin with a census of employees to see who is vaccinated and a process for safeguarding that information and keeping it confidential, he said.
"The legal challenges may not necessarily stop these regulations from going into effect immediately when they come out," Weinthal said.
Existing law allows employers to ask about vaccination status and create a vaccination requirement, he added.
It's unclear how firms will respond to the high-value employee, the top performer, who rejects testing or vaccination, Weinthal said.
But Biden didn't say "there will be a mandatory firing" for employees who refuse vaccination and testing, he noted.
Weinthal said he suspected there will be a "massive legal pushback" if the government mandates a firing, especially in a time when firms are having trouble filling certain positions.
Employers "theoretically have the right to control their own workforce -- it can't be abridged by the government," Weinthal said. But how do you measure the idea of losing your best person "against the idea that we can't even get full staffing in most businesses?"
With all the legal uncertainties, Weinthal said he questions whether the corporate vaccine mandate will ever become reality.
Patrick Thibodeau covers HCM and ERP technologies for TechTarget. He's worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.
