Weekly Client Update #1 During COVID Crisis

Apr 17, 2020

We’ve made it through another week! It sounds like we will need to hunker down for at least several more weeks in most parts of the country, so I hope that you and your families & teams are settling into a nice routine.

We are all getting a ton of resources and unsolicited advice in our inboxes, so I have sifted through some of the more important/useful ones.

Thanks to our friend and client Kelly Mitchell of impactHR. She reports that all employers with 500 or fewer employees must conspicuously post (or email, in the case of teleworkers) a poster that outlines employee rights under the FFCRA. It is effective April 1 to December 31, 2020. A few resources below:

There’s been a significant spike in online fraud and hacking attempts recently. Our managed services provider, Epoch, to whom we outsource our IT, reports a massive spike in intrusion attempts all across our economy. Our many adversaries overseas are launching serious attacks to exploit the many vulnerabilities of our new reality of working from home. Here are some important and easy steps to help safeguard your assets:

As the user, please do the following, effective immediately.

  1. Turn all devices off when not in use.  We recommend this for your other personal devices as well.
  2. Regarding SPAM, please be extra vigilant and second guess/verify all questionable emails.   The new ransomware is utilizing new techniques and methods to compromise user accounts and devices.
  3. Do not connect to corporate resources with personal or non-managed devices.
  4. Please review Epoch’s blog addressing these issues on a regular basis.  Click here for the latest COVID-19 Updates from Epoch.

To bounce off of that, here’s a link to an interesting perspective on the media, click-bait, and the 24/7 news cycle that has to constantly compete for our attention and our clicks.

Consider opening an internal job (for time tracking) and adding an expense line item into your general ledger called COVID-19 and track all time and expenses, including your staff and personal time spent dealing with a crisis.  Legal consults, insurance issues – whatever. This will make it easier if you need to apply for one of the grants or loans associated with the CARE Act (the $2T bill moving through congress).

Linked here is another article on continuing marketing during a recession for you to peruse.

On a positive note, we had a fun happy hour after work a few weeks ago via GoToMeeting. Check out our photo on our home page. Note the motto of “We were built for this. We’re energized by this. We got this.” It came from a discussion with my wife some time ago regarding what’s next for everyone. IMPACT really was built for this: all of our team members are so conscientious and able to be truly productive from home; our ethos of “No B.S.” has us giving our clients our best advice in these trying times, even if that advice is not in our own best interest; and most importantly, we’re all here for each other in whatever capacity is needed – we got “this” because we got each other. I couldn’t be more proud of our team.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or just need to talk, please do not hesitate to reach out! We very much appreciate you and are here to help in any way we can.

IMPACT Marketing & Public Relations, LLC

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