AFTER most of its employees have been vaccinated against Covid-19, the Mandaue City government has lifted its alternative work arrangements (AWA) and expects all employees to report to their offices.
During the peak of the pandemic in 2020, the city government released a memorandum allowing the non-essential offices and offices that are not directly related to Covid-19 response to avail of the AWA wherein employees could work from home and the offices would used skeletal workforce.
Most of these employees working from home are senior citizens and persons with comorbidities.
Mandaue City Mayor Jonas Cortes released a memorandum pertaining to the revocation of the AWA scheme of the city government starting on July 5, 2021.
Lawyer Jamaal Calipayan, the city administrator, said this memorandum was considered after most of the city government employees have been vaccinated and since in the past few months, the infection rate of the city has been low.
Aside from that, Calipayan said they have observed that a lot of clients are availing of the services of Mandaue City Hall and with the work-from-home scheme, they noticed some inconveniences and delays in the services.
He said before the AWA was lifted, the employees would report to their office every other day.
Calipayan added that they also plan to update the Citizen’s Charter and make amendments according to the new normal.
This is necessary since their existing Citizen’s Charter was made before the pandemic, said Calipayan.
Despite the revocation of the AWA, Calipayan said, they can still make exceptions especially for those persons with comorbidities, provided that they write a request to the Mayor’s Office.
Calipayan said they will evaluate the request and get a recommendation from a health expert if they are allowed to work from home or have some flexible work arrangements.
There are 700 regular employees and 3,000 job order employees under the city government.
In case an employee gets infected with Covid-19, Calipayan said they will immediately conduct contact tracing, office lockdown if needed, and the isolation period will be shortened if the contact-traced individual does not manifest any symptoms. This is following the existing protocol implemented by the local Inter-Agency Task Force.
Calipayan also emphasized that with this memo, the offices of the city government will still observe social distancing and wearing of masks, and use the barriers that have been installed on each table. (KFD)