Many companies to furlough more than a thousand employees amid coronavirus fallout
admin
0 Comments
Many companies to furlough more than a thousand employees amid coronavirus fallout. Job loss is there in the coming days with coronavirus epidemic.
Coronavirus spread rapidly around the world since it was first revealed in China less than three months ago. It has dealt an unparalleled shock to the global economy.
As governments are attempting to stabilize their economies, even the top-level companies facing a tough time. They navigate through many altered landscapes. It let millions of people face job losses and interrupted good and services. Following are the announcements from two businesses encountering fallouts due to the dangerous virus outbreak.
Marriott International about to furlough thousands of employees
The largest hotel company in the world, Marriott International Inc., announced Sunday it would furlough their corporate employees soon. More than thousands of employees are working in their headquarters in the U.S and across the globe. They will get furloughed as the company is forced to scale back due to the coronavirus pandemic. This decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal Sunday, adds to massive recent payroll reductions that began last week.
Marriot is the world’s largest hotel company. Like many of its peers, it is trying to cope up with a plunge in demand due to the coronavirus.
On Sunday, Marriott said that they are furloughing about two-thirds of its 4,000 corporate staffs at its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. It is also furloughing around two-thirds of its corporate workers abroad. Marriot has about 174,000 employees globally. The furloughs are assumed to start in April and last up to 90 days.
Marriott added that it hoped to bring back their staff when the demand for hotel and travel accommodations has resumed, and the threat of coronavirus has subsided.
The firm stated Donald Trump, the president of the united states last week that it has begun reducing employees’ hours and starting to furlough what could eventually become tens of thousands of workers at its hotels. It is a big crisis for such a big company where more than lakh of people wear a Marriott name badge globally.
Furloughed workers in the U.S. will get 20 per cent of their salary while those who are still currently employed are facing heavy pay cuts and reduced work hours, the company informed President Trump last week.
U.S. hotel businesses have been seeking $150 billion in direct aid from the government for their employees.
Marriott’s chains and franchisees have owned 7,300 properties around the globe. It covers 30 brands over the different parts of the world, including W Hotels, Courtyard and Sheraton under its 92-year-old umbrella.
President and CEO of Marriott Arne Sorenson also enumerated several other corporate cuts in a video posted to the company’s Twitter on Wednesday that foreshadowed the furloughs.
Sorenson declared that the pandemic had a “more rigorous and sudden financial impact on our business than Since COVID-19 started spreading more swiftly from Wuhan, China earlier this year. Sorenson said that business in China has declined 90 per cent and was ranking in “75 per cent below normal levels” in other parts of the world. It forced hundreds of hotel closures across the globe.
As a result, Sorenson, who has been healing from pancreatic cancer, and Executive Chairman Bill Marriott will not receive salaries for 2020. And his senior executive team is taking a 50 per cent pay cut, according to the company.
3,500 Halliburton staffs in Houston furloughed due to difficult oil market
Headquartered in HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK), Halliburton announced it is issuing a compulsory furlough to 3,500 staffs at its North Belt facility in Houston.
Beginning on March 23, employees on the mandatory leave of absence will work one-week off, one-week on for up to two months. Employees will get paid for the weeks that they are on, but will not get paid for the weeks they are off. The benefits and health insurance of the employees will remain in place.
This decision comes due to recent challenges in the oil market after the coronavirus outbreak.
Helps could soon be on the way, though.
On last Tuesday, the Trump administration said they are about to send checks to the public within the next two weeks. They want to help people through the financial distress of the coronavirus crisis.
Congress still has to approve the plan.
It is not exactly clear about how much money would be received, but Senator Mitt Romney has suggested $1,000.
How to become more productive when you work from home during coronavirus epidemic?
- admin
- 0 Comments
How to become more productive when you work from home during coronavirus epidemic? Fruitful ways to stay productive when working from home during coronavirus epidemic.
Work from home is an option most businesses have started adopting in the ongoing bid to curb the coronavirus outbreak. There are about 115 cases confirmed currently and has been one death in the UK.
Google, JP Morgan and Twitter are some of the large companies released Covid-19 contingency plans to UK-based staff, which include compulsory working from home.
It is believed that keeping employees further apart from each other can reduce the chance of group spread. It also avoids the opportunity for the virus to be caught during a commute or in communal office spaces.
Although the government hasn’t yet advised all businesses to follow suit and adopt remote working, Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his speech on Tuesday has said enforced home working could be an option if the situation worsens.
It isn’t an option for some workers. But what is the best way to maximise productivity for those who might find themselves sent home in the coming weeks? How will they maintain good physical and mental health, and not spend all day in the pyjamas when working from home? Know it below.
What are the perks of work from home during coronavirus epidemic?
- How to distinguish between work and home mode
One of the significant perks of working from home is slowly moving from bed to the sofa five minutes before you start. It can also be your biggest challenge.
Never forget that you are there to work. So, set yourself up in the right manner. Wake up on time, get dressed and brush your teeth at the start of the day instead of sitting in your pyjamas for eight long hours. So, Switch from home to work mode.
You can do something physically to make yourself ready for the day. Maybe it’s walking around the block, making a special tea, or lighting a candle at your desk. No matter what it is but do it without fail to create a strong association in your mind.
- Be realistic about what you can achieve
Working from home in a wide, open day can feel full of possibilities. One hundred forty-five things on the to-do list? No problem! Don’t fall into the trap of getting over-ambitious. Instead, be realistic and then possibly achieve more than you set out to. Then, you feel satisfied, rather than feeling disappointed you didn’t do everything.
Choose three to five things to do and aim to get the majority done before lunch break. Most people slow down in the mid-afternoon and having a lot in the list will give you the momentum to power through.
- Work in short bursts
When you are in the office, your day is get split by everything from meetings to lunch breaks and even toilet breaks. But when you sat at home on your own with no face-to-face interaction planned it can be easy to work for long, unbroken periods.
When we are in the office, our day is usually broken up with meetings. Although it can be frustrating, they divide the day up and create natural chunks of time. In contrast, the days at home can be very unstructured.
Impose structure on yourself to be more productive. For instance, working in 45-60 minute chunks of focused work followed by a short break. It can be an effective way to break the day up and maintain your concentration levels.
- Don’t forget to take breaks
It can be extremely challenging to tear yourself away from your laptop if you are worried people might think you are slacking off. But that doesn’t mean you should not take breaks. Just because you are feeling comfy at home, it doesn’t mean you don’t need a proper break.
Leave your desk for lunch and take benefit of being at home. You can walk the dog and blow the cobwebs away for half an hour in the afternoon. Then, you will return feeling refreshed and more productive for the rest of the day.
It also includes ensuring you make time to make proper meals and drink water regularly, instead of snacking continuously throughout the day and then crashing in a sugar slump at 3 pm.
- Manage distractions
Being in the office atmosphere gives us a limited number of ways to get distracted. But when you start working at home, you may easily get distracted.
There are plenty of potential distractions when we work from home. So, proactively handle things, which might interrupt your focus.
Keep them limited to do in the short breaks in between the chunks of focused work. As a change of scene, we need to give our brain a break. And it is the perfect time to put a load of washing on or empty the dishwasher.
- Be sociable
Unless you are self-isolating, working from home should not mean that you will not leave the house at all or don’t see your acquaintance for two weeks. Ensure you still keep up social interaction.
If you are a person, who will miss your colleagues when you work from home, build opportunities for socialising into your day. Try to call your colleagues rather than constantly email or Slack messaging.
If you really struggle to apply yourself, try virtual ‘body doubling’. Connect with a colleague via a Skype video call but both work ‘live’ on your project rather than chatting.
