Alternative to lay offs

- Hey everybody, this is Drew McLellan from Agency Management Institute. This week, I am coming to you from my downstairs library. I'm hoping that this work from home thing goes by quickly because I'm going to run out of places in my house to show you. But in the meantime, I am home just like you are, and I am worrying about the same things that you are. So, I've been talking to a lot of agency owners, as you can imagine, over the course of the last couple weeks, and one of the biggest worries for all of you is, how do I manage financially to get through this season, to get through this storm, to make sure that I get the agency back through the storm and to calm waters? How do I do that when I have to manage cashflow, and clients are pulling projects or pausing projects, but I still have the same nut in terms of my salaries? So, am I going to have to lay people off? Am I going to have to give people some sort of severance package? What are they going to do about health insurance, given that this is a health crisis? So I know that it's a concern that many of you have. And so, I want to make sure that you are aware of a program here in the States called the WorkShare program, and at the end of the video, I will give you a URL where you can go and see if your state is participating. But about 30 of the states inside the US have a program called the WorkShare program, and what that is, is basically, it allows you to take full-time employees, make them part-time employees, and unemployment will make up the difference in their salaries. So for example, if you had a 40-hour person that you needed to take back to 20 hours, or if you wanted to do this across the board if you're suffering that much loss of work, then everybody could work half time and you could take care of your clients. You could take everybody down to 20 hours. You have to fill out an application through your state's unemployment program, and then your people can apply for that program, and what it does is it supplements the income you're giving them to the same percentage. So for example, if I'm your employee and you've cut me down to 50% of my work week and my salary, I can apply to this program, and they will give me the unemployment, what I would have gotten on an unemployment, the equivalent of that 50%. So, it's not going to make them whole. It's not going to give them their whole salary, but it will give them more income than you're able to give them, and it will allow them, hopefully, to get through this with you so you can call them back to full-time service when we are through this crisis. So before you do a wide scale layoff, or before you do pay cuts across the board, be thinking about maybe this WorkShare program and see if it makes sense for you, your agency, and your people, and again, I'll show you the URL in a second where you can check it out. You can read about how it works and see if it's a solution that is a win-win for everybody. Okay? Hang in there! We're going to get through this together, and I will be back next week.