For a while there, it seemed like everybody was getting ready to go back into the office, right? Now? Not so much.
As national infection rates increase on the heels of the Thanksgiving holiday–and fears mount that the omicron variant will wreak further havoc on our health care system, economy, and daily life–it appears that all of those return-to-office plans may have been just a bit premature.
“This is just like Groundhog Day,” said John Ho, co-chair of the OSHA and workplace-safety practice of law firm Cozen O’Connor. “We had clients planning to bring people back after the New Year -- there’s some who have already decided to delay given omicron and also just the rise in COVID numbers overall.”
In-office work (and onboarding) seems less realistic in Q1 than it did even a few weeks ago– leaders who planned to get their HR teams back to business as usual will be sorely disappointed and discouraged.
When the Planned Return Becomes More of a Retreat
Perhaps none so prominently as Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman. In June, he scolded his staff about their reluctance to return to in-office work, famously saying that if they could go and eat in a restaurant, they could work onsite. Obviously, since June, the country has experienced the crippling delta variant and is now staring down the omicron barrel.
To his credit, Gorman is now plainly admitting the error of his ways. “I was wrong on this,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “Everybody’s still finding their way and then you get the omicron variant. Who knows, we’ll have pi, we’ll have theta and epsilon, and we’ll eventually run out of letters of the alphabet. It’s continuing to be an issue.”
In this era of permanent pandemic, remote work and remote onboarding will be a fact of life for the foreseeable future.
This means, of course, that part of onboarding New Hires must include Remote I-9 Verifications to confirm their employment eligibility. TrendSource is a pioneer of Remote I-9 Verification services and remains a singular provider.
TrendSource I-9 Employee Verification Services and the Permanent Pandemic
To offer Remote I-9 Employee Verifications across the country, TrendSource leverages its vast, nationwide network of Field Agents, who can meet New Hires wherever is most convenient.
Upon receiving an order, TrendSource reaches out to the New Hire with a link for them to complete Section 1 of Form I-9. Once this is done, TrendSource pairs the New Hire with an experienced Field Agent who can document their employment eligibility as they complete Section 2 of Form I-9 together, in-person. New Hires will not be handed off to an overwhelmed local notary or tasked with finding their own verification provider.
Remote I-9 Verification services help companies onboard their new remote employees by allowing HR departments to outsource employment eligibility compliance management. No matter if the New Hire lives down the block or across the country, HR teams can confidently turn to TrendSource to document their compliance with federal employment regulations.
And they can even be ordered online.
