Good morning,

As you and your colleagues return to the office, you’re probably thinking about instituting Covid-19 testing, temperature checks, and health surveys. Here’s some advice: Tread lightly.

Measures like these can help everyone stay safe. At the same time, your business needs to comply with a raft of health and employee privacy regulations--and not all of them are obvious or particularly easy to understand. For example, if you require testing for employees to perform their jobs, it’s illegal to pass the cost on to those workers. So are you footing the bill, or is your insurance company? Probably you, but you need to check: Ultimately, it depends on the state in which you operate.

Contract tracing is similarly important--and similarly convoluted. If you need to inform employees that they may have been exposed to the coronavirus by a coworker, you’re only allowed to share limited information: that they were potentially exposed, when and where that exposure occurred, and when that coworker was diagnosed. But you can’t identify the coworker in any way--unless, of course, that person provides specific legal consent.

See what I mean? There’s a lot to process here. Read our story to learn the testing nuances that safeguard your company’s health, safety, and business liability.