A Barrie company facing the pandemic has found that plain back-and-forth talk with its workers is the best way to battle COVID-19.
Rebecca Dawson, human resources manager at Albarrie Canada, said this method has been helpful a year into this global health crisis.
“I think (it’s) allowing our employees to know that it was OK to be honest with us,” she told BarrieToday. “If there’s a challenge at home, if someone at home is sick, if a child is sick, our employees have been very honest and trustworthy when those issues have arisen… they can text or call us any time of day if they have questions.
“So I think being allowed to be open, having flexibility with what we can do for people if situations do arise has allowed us to ensure that people aren’t coming into the workplace ill," Dawson added.
Albarrie is owned by Margaret and Reg Driscoll, and has been in business since 1983. It now employs about 125 people at its two operations on Morrow Road and Huronia Road, manufacturing industrial non-woven fabrics used in many technical industries.
Albarrie is also involved in the protective apparel business, aluminum extrusion industry, wet filtration, geotextile, waste containment, and various other textile-related businesses.
Like other local manufacturing operations, it faced next challenges when the pandemic hit in mid-March 2020.
“We always had emergency preparedness processes and policies, (but) obviously not for something like a pandemic illness, “ Dawson said.
Eventually, Albarrie had active screening, with every employee filling out an online application before they come into work each day, separated break and lunch areas, ensuring physical distancing, personal protective equipment (PPE), workplace barriers, and third-party cleaning.
“Typically, they don’t come in, but if someone does come into the workplace and they’ve got cold-like symptoms, we remove them immediately and ask them to go and get tested, no matter what their symptoms are at this point,” Dawson said. “We do have some paid sick time that we offer our employees, so it’s allowed people that are ill to at least have some time that’s paid so they don’t feel as pressured to make sure they come into work even if they are sick.
“And we did provide work-from-home arrangements for particular individuals with roles that could be done remotely,” she added. “We don’t have a lot, because we are manufacturing. A lot of our office support roles interact directly with manufacturing consistently, but any roles, sales roles and such that can be done from home, we have moved those people into home offices for the time being.”
But the pandemic is persistent and no precautions are fool-proof.
Dawson said there was one outbreak at the Huronia Road operation last November/December: five employees became ill. She said public health officials didn’t link it to transmission within the workplace, but the plant was closed for a couple of days and cleaned before employees returned.
“We had one employee pass away, one he only found out just because precautionarily (he) went to get tested, so he was asymptomatic, and we had three others that had kind of a wide spectrum of symptoms,” she said. “Some that are still suffering with some of the long-term effects from the virus.”
Since then, a few other Albarrie employees have tested positive, Dawson said, but there have been no more situations with multiple people.
A few employees tied to Roberta Place (the Barrie long-term care home linked to 71 deaths) were removed from the workplace for 14 days by public health officials.
And Albarrie will help its employees with the next stage of the pandemic.
“Now we’re at the point of vaccine rollout, so we’ve got a policy that we will pay employees for a certain number of hours through a working day if that’s when their vaccine has been booked,” Dawson said, “so that they are able to take that time off, free of worry from losing pay and go and get their vaccines to encourage as much participation as we can.”
Dawson said Albarrie has only laid off a handful of people during the pandemic, and just for four weeks. Since then, everybody has been employed, the company is growing and is in the process of hiring new employees.
