How has the pandemic changed your thoughts about hiring? Will you hire more part-time employees or offer flextime?

Dealing with uncertainty requires flexibility. Given you don't know about numbers of patients/clients/customers returning, you also don't know about revenue levels.  Outsourcing those functions that can be outsourced, having 1099's at this time, seems smart.  Remember, the business is the nucleus that keeps the cell alive.  Its viability is the uppermost priority.  

I may be among the few exceptions in that due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lock-down, our business has seen a big increase with existing and some new clients calling us to setup their employees to work remotely/from home. In the early months of the shutdown (late March through mid May 2020), we actually had to turn down 75% of new business due to:

1. Our limited capacity to service new clients and yet maintain our 5-star high-quality service levels.
2. My techs concerned about going onsite to people's homes and businesses and risk infection, etc.

But to answer the question more directly, I ended up hiring more techs. Our standard hiring practice is to hire them as 1099 in the beginning to see how they perform, act/behave, etc. and even then on a 90-day probationary period. We keep the best and get rid of the rest. This method of employment has worked for us for the past 14 years that we've been in business and has demonstrated fantastic results and it shows in our 5-star ratings across multiple social media platforms (Google, Yelp, Amazon, and Alignable).

In summary, we have not changed our hiring practices but we have hired new people to meet the increased demand for our IT services. No doubt some of you reading this post might be our clients so I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your business and your support.

Can't even consider hiring additional staff until this economy picks back up.

All of our staff is full-time and we have not had to reduce staff or curtail any hours through this pandemic.  With over half of our staff being mobile service technicians and mechanics, they're not "in the office" or need office space.  Thus, the operations folks are able to operate "in the office" with minimal changes - but do have several folks working remotely to keep our capacity at of below 10 people in the office.  Know we're blessed to be considered an "essential business" and in the positive financial position we're in.

most of my staff is part-time I am just looking for people with less social life and understand the importance of COVID protection tends to be someone who has older people in their home I have to protect not just my customers but also my staff

As an essential business, we stayed open for curbside pickup and free shipping to all 50 States. We still lost about 50% of our sales the past few months, but we are starting to pick up again. I have been doing this without employees for the past 3 months. However, we are looking to hire at least 1 part time person this week (hopefully). Last week was better and we hope that our sales continue to grow as things start to open up. 

We are hiring the same, looking for good full-time employees that look upon the position as a career move, we offer 401k and health Insurance , paid vacation and flexible hours. Together we can get through this. Paid a 2 % bonus as a reward for hazard conditions . We are an essential business and have not closed or missed a day. Have drive thru window and have conducted business keepin patients out of pharmacy.

Our tech employees are remote so hiring is not an issue. This is how we've run our business since the beginning. We have been gaining more business as an outsourced IT vendor because of the way we run. We are able to help so many companies at the fraction of the cost of a full-time employee who's in-house.

I decided that the only way to keep my current employees was to get creative and add additional items, such as sanitizer, to our office break room product line.  This has definitely helped, but I’m still a bit unsure if I will be able to keep them through the year.  This is due to the increasing number of offices allowing employees to work from home.  I totally understand it, but in my business I need employees in the office consuming products.