Kimball International takes steps to prevent spread of coronavirus

Kimball International issued a press release giving an overview of the steps the company is taking to protect its employees.

The statement is below.

At Kimball International, there is nothing more important than the health and safety of our employees, our customers and the communities in which we operate.

As we face this time of unprecedented uncertainty, we have been taking action to proactively safeguard and support our people whose normal way of life is being impacted by COVID-19.

For our employees, we have set up an internal task force to manage both our proactive approach and our company-wide response plan and launched a global hotline and a dedicated internal website to direct employees’ questions, provide easily accessible facts and escalate issues.

Across the company, we have instituted new policies, including:

• We have asked all professional roles to work remotely, and have temporarily closed our showroom locations for at least two weeks.
• We have restricted all business travel, and have encouraged employees to reconsider personal travel based on CDC guidelines.
• We have introduced stringent guidelines to limit visitors at our many locations.

For our valued manufacturing employees, we have introduced several programs to support them, including:

• A new Voluntary Leave option that will allow our manufacturing employees to utilize Paid Time Off to continue receiving pay if they wish to stay at home. Beyond this, our plan is to provide additional Paid Time Off, which will be incremental to any existing PTO, to support all of our manufacturing employees. We look forward to sharing more details on this soon.
• A Special Care Program to provide up to two weeks of paid leave for employees that are considered higher risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19.
• A Manufacturing Employee Fund that will provide financial support to employees facing hardships caused by this issue.

“We understand these are challenging times for everyone and it is our top priority to support our employees through this crisis,” said Kristie Juster, CEO of Kimball International. “We want our employees to feel comfortable staying at home, and reassured that we are taking steps to provide manufacturing employees with additional paid time off to do so. For our employees that want to continue working, we have taken action to ensure we have a clean, safe work environment in place for them.”

We have also educated all employees on health and safety measures to keep themselves safe based on CDC guidelines, and have enhanced cleaning procedures at our facilities across the globe. We will continue to evaluate and implement measures to best support all of our employees as this issue develops.