With COVID-19 cases steadily rising in Utah, Salt Lake City-based WECC will postpone plans to bring more staff back into its offices and resume in-person meetings, CEO Melanie Frye said last week.

The regional entity’s current policy of allowing staff to return to the office on a voluntary basis will remain in place “until further notice,” Frye told WECC’s Board of Directors on Thursday.

“We continue to be focused on the health and safety of our employees as well as our stakeholders,” she said.

Frye had informed the board in June that WECC was targeting mid-September to implement its “FlexWork” program, designed to provide most employees the flexibility to work from home, while also holding out the requirement that some staff might need to put in “core hours” at the office, including to attend trainings, committee meetings, regulatory audits and board meetings.

A steady uptick in COVID-19 cases in Utah has prompted WECC to delay its plan to bring more staff back into its offices this month. | WECC

“Under the FlexWork program, an employee’s work schedule will be subject to the overriding WECC requirement that departmental operations, services and commitments will always be maintained to effectively meet our obligations and support our business, colleagues and stakeholders,” WECC said.

But management changed course as Utah’s COVID-19 case counts soared because of the increased transmissibility and virulence of the Delta variant. On Thursday, Frye pointed that Utah was experiencing declining case counts in August 2020, but it saw cases sharply rise last month, despite the widespread availability of vaccines since early in the year.

“We’ve all heard about the Delta variant and the impact that that is having. … We’ll want monitor to see what transpires over the course of the next few months and make decisions for employees as well as work meetings in the new year,” Frye said. WECC will host all meetings online at least through the end of the year, she said.

Frye said about 10% of WECC’s staff — between 10 and 15 employees — are coming into the office on a regular basis as the organization continues to maintain safety protocols in the office and prohibit any full department from being in the office at the same time, “just to make sure that we sort of spread the risk if there were to be an outbreak.”

And while staff choosing to work remotely are “doing so quite successfully,” Frye expressed concern about the long-term implications of that arrangement.

“We’re wanting to make sure that we continue to focus on our culture and our inner workings within the organization, so that will continue to be a challenge and a focus of our management team,” Frye said.