Outbreaks at CalPERS and other workplaces show executives can do more to combat COVID

With a triple pandemic of COVID, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) hitting the United States hard this winter, causing an explosion of illness, business executives need to take the lead on promoting newly updated COVID boosters. Doing so will help reduce the number of sick days taken by their workers, minimize COVID outbreaks and superspreader events within their companies, reduce employee fears about returning to the office, and position executives as trustworthy participants in responsible capitalism.

Research shows that the recently released bivalent boosters from Pfizer and Moderna, which target both the omicron and earlier COVID variants, are, like the original vaccines, very safe. They are also more effective than previous vaccines against the omicron variants, which are prevalent in the United States and in other countries around the globe.

The boosters are widely available and paid for by the government. Unfortunately, however, uptake has been slow, with health officials expressing grave concerns about the small numbers of people getting booster shots.

The low uptake stems from vaccine hesitancy and lack of knowledge. Less than a third of those surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they intended to get the new boosters. That’s despite the fact that the nation is experiencing hundreds of COVID-related deaths per day and many additional losses from flu and RSV.

The consequences for executives and their employees can be dire. Nobody wants their staff — or themselves — to contribute to these statistics.

And yet what are executives doing about it? Not much. That’s despite outbreaks at major workplaces that required employees to return to their offices, including Bay Area-based Google and Sacramento’s California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the government worker pension system valued at over $400 billion.

Business leaders failing to take action are revealing an omission bias. This cognitive bias is a dangerous judgment error that tends to downplay the costs of inaction in our minds.

Executives need to recognize the consequences of failing to encourage new booster shots. The more employees get shots, the less sick days they will take. Better booster uptake will also lower the chances that staff members will have to permanently reduce their hours or even withdraw from the labor force.

Similarly, advocating boosters will minimize COVID outbreaks in a company. Doing so avoids not just the health dangers and bad publicity of such outbreaks but also damage to morale among employees asked to return to the office.

Last but far from least, advocating boosters allows executives to serve as trustworthy exemplars of what the Business Roundtable has defined as the purpose of the modern company: stakeholder capitalism. Supporting the communities we work in is one aspect of this kind of corporate citizenship, and there’s little doubt that reducing COVID outbreaks among a company’s employees supports broader community health and well-being.

So what should executives do? Rather than mandating boosters, they should create appropriate norms and nudge employees to engage in win-win behaviors using behavioral-science-based approaches.

Executives should both publicly advocate for the new boosters and get the shots themselves. The chief executive of one of my client organizations wrote up a blog post for an internal company newsletter about the benefit of getting the bivalent booster, for example, accompanied by a photo of him getting the jab. She also strongly encouraged her managers to get the booster and to discuss doing so with their team members. The company also brought in a well-respected epidemiologist to answer questions and address concerns among staff members and then offered paid time off to get the shot along with sick leave for any side effects.

Such behavioral-science-informed approaches help benefit company bottom lines by reducing sick days, addressing worker resistance to coming to the office, minimizing public-relations fiascoes and helping executives practice a more responsible form of capitalism.