Ninety staff at Grey County will be receiving redeployment requests, and, if they refuse, they will be laid off.
“At the outset of this crisis, I told staff that we wanted to support them for the time being as long as they were working and/or willing to be redeployed,” said Kim Wingrove, CAO of Grey County. “If they should refuse a redeployment request, and they do not have a medical reason for that refusal, then the messaging has been delivered that they will be placed on an unpaid leave of absence or laid off until the situation resolves.”
Wingrove reports that the county currently employs 250 staff members outside of the long term care and paramedic departments. Of those 250 employees, 90 have been deemed ‘non-essential.'
“For some of our departments, their workload has actually increased during this crisis response, in places like social services and housing,” Wingrove said. “In other departments, like finance, HR, planning, they are still needed to provide those critical functions that they always provide.”
Wingrove says staff will likely be re-deployed to the long term care, housing, or the custodial department. The county began the process of redeploying staff in mid-March.
“Immediately, the economic development department provided 15 staff members, they were trained and began working in all three homes,” said Jennifer Cornell, executive director of long term care in Grey County. “I can’t say how grateful I am for those first 15 people to put their hands up and the support from the HR department to get this done. It has been wonderful and they really led the way on this.”
Wingrove says so far 28 Grey County staff members have been trained and redeployed to the long term care department and another 30 will be trained this week.
She said the county is currently not anticipating the need for layoffs, adding that it is in their best interest to retain staff for the post-COVID-19 situation.
“When I talked to my other county CAO colleagues across the southwest, this will be a similar tag. We need these people and we are going to have an enormous amount of work for them to undertake during the recovery phase and to deal with a backlog of work that is occurring right now,” Wingrove added.
