COVID-19 Information and FAQs

As of Jan. 1, employers may voluntarily provide emergency paid sick leave or emergency paid FMLA leave under FFCRA. If an employer chooses to voluntarily offer leave, it must be used for the same purposes and subject to the same conditions as originally outlined in FFCRA.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last December issued guidance indicating that employers may encourage or possibly require COVID-19 vaccinations, but policies must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Practice Support and Risk Management are receiving calls from member dentists concerned about how the pandemic is affecting daily business operations. To ensure all member concerns are addressed, CDA has compiled the most recent, commonly asked questions from member dentists about reducing employee hours and wages, managing delinquent accounts, patient dismissals and more.

Dental practice schedules and production have certainly been a rollercoaster in 2020. As we near the end of the year, many practices are reporting a slight decline in patient volume compared to the third quarter. 

Practice owners should revise their COVID-19 contact tracing protocols to reflect the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new guidelines on what it means to have been in close contact with an infected person. This could mean analyzing brief interactions between employees and infected colleagues or patients that may have occurred several times a day, instead of one or two prolonged exposures.

As people become more comfortable with traveling again, practice owners may be questioning the best way to maintain a safe work environment while managing employees who choose to travel. These tips can help employers establish a travel policy and develop a plan for how to reintegrate employees into the workplace following their travel.

Now that most schools will remain closed longer than expected, many businesses are unsure of their options for employees or the legal implications that accompany them.

Start your new year on the right foot by auditing your human resources systems and records. To diminish the possibility of legal issues and to ensure that your practice seeks to comply with labor and employment laws, it is important to perform an HR audit. An audit can include timekeeping and wage statements and all of the following.

With so much emphasis on the need for employers to establish written policies mandated by federal, state and local laws, it’s easy to overlook the important day-to-day employee management policies on everything from hygiene and smoking to use of personal electronic devices. Discussed below are four areas of employee conduct and attire expectations that you might consider addressing through a workplace policy, if you don’t already have one in place.

A new state law prohibits discrimination on the basis of hair textures or protective hairstyles that are historically associated with race. Senate Bill 188, also known as the CROWN Act, was signed in July by Gov. Gavin Newsom and will take effect Jan. 1, 2020. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act was amended by the law to include in the definition of race “traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles.”