Aptima During COVID-19
Aptima Growing, Expanding Employee Benefits in Response to COVID-19
12 full-time employees and nine interns hired, and going beyond FFCRA to protect staff
Aptima has always prided itself on our ability to rapidly pivot—we excel at nimbly adjusting and adapting to changing customer demands, fluctuations in the economy, and emerging technologies. When it was announced on March 11 that everyone at Aptima should start working from home effective the next day, Aptima leadership quickly sprang into action to ensure a seamless transition for both customers and employees.
Supporting Our Customers
As a defense contractor and therefore an “essential business,” Aptima restricted access to physical office locations and implemented stay-at-home orders, but the company has not shut down. Within a week of changing to almost exclusively remote operations, Aptima’s Executive Team crafted a set of specific steps each project leader should take to manage and minimize the potential negative impact that this new reality might have on the planning and the execution of projects.
Aptima has also hired 12 full-time employees since March 1. These new Aptimists expand the number of scientists, research engineers, instructional systems designers, software engineers, creative media specialists, and program managers that support our customer work. In addition, we hired nine summer interns from colleges and universities across the country. These students are studying a variety of disciplines, including research psychology, biomedical research, computer science, business administration, and marketing.
Supporting Our Staff
While new legislation added to Aptima’s leave policy at the start of April, the Aptima Executive Team made the decision to go beyond the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) to ensure that employees will retain their full paycheck, even when caring for family members with COVID.
The FFRA guarantees two weeks of paid sick leave at the employee’s regular rate if they’re unable to work due to quarantine, and/or experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and seeking a medical diagnosis. The FFRA also guarantees two weeks of paid sick leave at two-thirds the employee’s regular rate if they’re unable to work while they care for a quarantined family member, or care for a child whose school or child care provider is closed or unavailable due to COVID-19. Aptima’s employees will receive two weeks of paid sick leave at 100% of their regular rate to care for a family member due to either quarantine, or lack of school or child care. The company is covering the additional one-third of the employee’s regular rate at its own expense.
Recognizing that stay-at-home has also cancelled many planned vacations and In an effort to maximize work/life balance, Aptima has temporarily increased the maximum number of vacation hours that employees can accrue this year. From May 1 through December 31, 2020, employees will be able to accrue up to a total of 240 hours of vacation time at their normal accrual rate, up from the usual accrual maximum of 160 hours.
“Aptima’s leadership team and I fully recognize that this is an extraordinary situation that requires extraordinary steps,” said Daniel Serfaty, Aptima’s Founder, Chairman, and CEO. “As an organization, we have shown tremendous resilience is the past and we must do it again now. By supporting our employees while we continue to serve our customers, we will emerge from this temporary crisis as an even stronger team.”
About Aptima, Inc.
For 25 years, Aptima’s mission has been to improve and optimize performance in mission-critical, technology-intensive settings. We apply deep expertise in how humans think, learn, and perform to today’s challenges. Whether for fighter pilots functioning in the cockpit, medical staff in the ICU, or teams collaborating across distributed networks, our solutions help measure, assess, inform, and augment human performance in defense, intel, aviation, law enforcement, and healthcare. For more information, visit www.Aptima.com.
Media Contact:
Joel Greenberg
DCPR
Joel@dcpr.com
202-363-1065 | 202-669-3639 cell
