Companies should encourage their employees to get vaccinated for Covid through incentives, not mandates, according to Wharton school teacher Nancy Rothbard.
“There are a lot of challenges with the mandate of employees to do anything,” Rothbard told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “Any boss will tell you, it’s much more about persuasion than telling.”
The question of whether workers should be required to be vaccinated to return to office has been highlighted recently, as about 3 million people in the US a day are shot. The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that nearly a quarter of the American adult population is fully vaccinated.
While many experts believe it is legal for employers to make vaccines mandatory, business leaders may worry about alienating staff.
“Trying to get people to get vaccinated, I think, will be a much more popular way than mandates,” said Rothbard, a management professor whose research focuses in part on motivation and work involvement.
Companies like Tractor Supply offer employees one-time cash payments to encourage them to receive a Covid vaccine. Target offers employees up to four hours of pay per hour – two hours for each dose for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which require two photos. Target also offers help with Lyft payments to and from meetings.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the only other one authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use in the United States, is a single dose.
Businesses should be aware of employees’ preferences when it comes to disclosing vaccine status, Rothbard said, adding that some people are less comfortable sharing personal information of any kind with employers and colleagues.
“There are ways to make this more private, where you may want to take an employee aside and say, ‘Look, have you been vaccinated?’ … If you haven’t done it, then we need to make alternative arrangements “” for the safety of others, she offered.
The debate over vaccine disclosure in the workplace does not diminish the need for Americans to be inoculated to help end the pandemic, Rothbard said. “The term ‘herd immunity’ means a collective cost to it, not just an individual decision that people make when they choose to get vaccinated.”
Despite the importance, Rothbard pointed out that incentives are likely to be effective in helping companies achieve high vaccination rates among the workforce.
“I have a work called ‘Mandatory Fun.’ “People don’t even like to be forced to have fun if they don’t feel legitimate at work,” she said. “People don’t react well to warrants. They respond better to incentives and encouragement. “
Vaccine proof for customers
Whether customers should present evidence of vaccination to get services to a business – such as restaurant food, for example – has become another controversial issue in the US Some critics raise civil liberties issues, while supporters of the so-called Vaccine passports say that the need for people to prove that they have been vaccinated brings benefits to public health, allowing a safe reopening of the economy.
Last week, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order restricting businesses from asking a customer to provide evidence that they have received a Covid vaccine as a precondition for service. In his order, DeSantis claims that Covid vaccine passports “reduce individual freedom and affect the patient’s privacy.”
Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas, issued a similar order on Tuesday, banning the state government and publicly funded entities from applying for passports for the Covid vaccine.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, told CNBC on Wednesday that he believes the conversation about checking the status of the vaccine was unfounded.
“I think we thought about the wrong lens vaccine passports. I think the way they’re going to be used is really to create two access lanes in different places,” Gottlieb said in an interview with Squawk Box. “. ”
For people who cannot show they have been vaccinated, Covid tests may be needed along with secondary screening for symptoms, said Gottlieb, who now serves on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer.
“The other will be a fast lane, where if you can prove you’ve been vaccinated, you won’t have to prove you’ve been tested recently,” or go through some sort of symptom check, Gottlieb said.
“It will be like an E-ZPass, where you can go either on the fast lane or if you still like to pay the toll booth, because you think the police are following you with the E-ZPass device, then you can stop and stand in line and pay the toll box, “he said.
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a board member of Pfizer, the Tempus genetic testing start-up, medical technology company Aetion Inc. and the biotechnology company Illumina. He is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings‘ and Royal Caribbean“The panel with healthy sails”. The Associated Press contributed to this report.