The lockdown announced by the government to contain the spread of the coronavirus has forced employees to work from home for about three weeks now. This new normal might just become standard practice, at least for some employees even after Covid-19 situation is resolved. Approximately half of the companies have shifted smoothly towards a work from home model to keep services uninterrupted during the lockdown. experts say some companies are likely to shift to WFH permanently. The current situation has paved the way for a paradigm shift. It will allow most people to distribute the workforce across the country. Other reasons why companies are sticking to the WFH option is because it involves cost savings, convenience, and productivity gains if implemented correctly.
WFH will give companies more flexibility to move according to business needs. Employees could be compensated based on transactions . The more productive someone is, more they will be compensated.
With shops selling grocery and essential products still operating, many for longer hours due to panic buying, most companies including godrej consumer, Amul , Mother Dairy etc are putting in additional effort to replenish stock quickly. On the other hand, for the sevice sector, work from home may not be the best feasible option. Still there are various companies which are still serving at this hour of need. Genixo Info Solutions, itself came in the front foot and conveyed its employees to stay at home and work remotely. Other than this, various companies are supporting the government's decision. Consider Indigo, It has allowed staff to work from home. The airline has segregated airport staff into smaller groups with more frequent rotations and spacing out restoring for its crew.
Getting large numbers of white-collar employees to work from home has never been more critical. In other words, the quicker companies adopt work from home practices, the better it would be for India's war on Covid-19.
Bengaluru, as a back office to the world , ought to be in the vanguard. With video conferencing made easier by companies such as Zoom, information sharing made seamless across teams by software from Google, Slack and Dropbox even small firms can allow remote work easily.
In the past month, large numbers of companies all over the world have switched to work from home. Seattle, hit by the first outbreak in the US, saw the early adoption by companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. towards the end of February. An article in the Harvard Business Review last August (Is it Time to Let Employees Work from Anywhere?) cites productivity gains among patent examiners in the US and travel agency employees in China, when they were allowed to work from home in different provinces or even different countries.
As far-fetched as such leaps of faith in their employees would seem to most Indian employers, responses to Covid-19 are likely to reinvent office life in semi-permanent ways.
Conclusion
The epidemic “will not make business travel or lean global supply chains disappear", said The Economist earlier this month, but will force companies to “question the wisdom of old habits"
In the short term, more white-collar work done remotely will hopefully save lives by slowing the spread of Covid-19. In the longer term, it might yet foster better-managed companies in India—and fewer vehicles logjammed on Delhi-Gurugram roads or those headed to the Electronic City in Bengaluru.
This would be healthy both in terms of employees’ work-life balance in India’s chaotic and clogged metros and in responding to a changing business landscape where more decision-making needs to happen further down the corporate ladder.
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