Daily COVID-19 Update from CEO Jeff Szabo - April 16, 2020
To all Employees:
As you know, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Suffolk County Water Authority implemented a number of temporary policy and procedure changes to protect the health of our employees and ensure our continued ability to provide a high quality and reliable drinking water supply to our customers. One such change allowed employees to work from home. Close to 150 employees from nearly all departments have participated in this telecommuting initiative.
The initiative has proven to be a workable, short-term means of continuing productivity while protecting employee safety during these unprecedented times, with supervisors overseeing and resolving any issues that come up and employees submitting work logs and summaries accounting for work performed. Although telecommuting is not ideal, our employees—both those working from home and those supervising them—have made it work to the benefit of our customers.
Some employees working from home have asked when they will report back to their SCWA office. Please know we are evaluating conditions on a daily basis, and although the curve of new positive COVID-19 cases in New York may have leveled off, we may still have a long way to go before the danger of COVID-19 subsides to a degree that we can safely return employees to their work stations. We will be relying on direction from Governor Cuomo and scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as to when it will be safe to resume standard operations.
Thank you for your continued cooperation and please stay safe. And a special thank you to our Information Technology staff for their efforts in assisting telecommuting employees with technical issues that have arisen during the work-from-home initiative.
If you have any questions of a general nature pertaining to COVID-19 and SCWA protocol that you would like answered either directly or in an all employee bulletin, please email Tim Motz at tim.motz@scwa.com. Workplace safety-related inquiries should be directed to Nicholas Swain at nicholas.swain@scwa.com. Please contact Donna Mancuso at donna.mancuso@scwa.com with any questions concerning COVID-19 and the workplace.