AI systems and robots may emerge as an investment area: Kunal Aman, SAS

SAS has been a leader in analytics, artificial intelligence and data management. AI and ML are said to be the most transformative technologies of our time, and SAS is more committed than ever to investing in its potential to move humanity forward.

Here, Kunal Aman, Marketing Head, Japan and India, SAS, talks about the future of work. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you dealing with the Covid-19 situation? What plans have you put in place?

Kunal Aman: COVID-19 has continued to spread, disrupting markets, organizations and our daily lives. At an executive leadership level, we have been constantly monitoring the situation and responding swiftly and decisively to new developments.

At SAS, our role as leaders is to keep everyone (both employees and customers) safe and to make them feel safe—economically, mentally and physically; in both certain times and in uncertain times.

For employees:
The SAS India Management has taken the following measures effective 16th March until the lockdown terminates:
* Work from home for employees across India with unlimited data usage.
* We have made all the checks to ensure employees are equipped to support customers from home.
* We are leveraging best in class tools for calls, video conferencing to stay in touch with each other as well as with our customers and partners.

For customers:
SAS is focusing on helping customers during this crisis. We have made all our e-courses available for free for anyone who wants to upskill themselves on analytics.

SAS has already created a publicly-available report that depicts the status, location, spread and trend analysis of the coronavirus. We are engaged on several projects around the world helping customers use data and analytics in the fight against the virus.

In India, we are proactively engaging state governments to help them track key public health metrics, identify presumptive cases sooner, so possible exposures can get tested and treated if needed, identify at-risk populations and optimize critical resources such as hospital beds.

We are helping financial institutions and insurance companies take stock of critical processes and revisit their Business Continuity Plans (BCP), manage their liquidity positions in a pandemic scenario. Additionally, we are working with customers in CPG, Retail and Manufacturing to help them sense short-term demand, optimizing their supply chain, plan inventory as well.

DQ: Are you giving employees more control over their schedules?

Kunal Aman: At SAS, our employees always had control over their schedules. With the ‘new normal’ requiring us to work from home, we are advising our employees to:
* Stick to a schedule. Although tempting to sleep in, having a regular routine brings a sense of predictability and comfort to your day.
* Stay socially connected while physically distancing. Social isolation can lead to increased health risks so make some type of virtual social connection each day.
* Pay attention to exercise, diet and sleep. Research shows the importance of self-care, especially during times of stress. It’s fine to treat yourself occasionally, but maintain a healthy diet, sleep schedule and regular exercise for overall well-being.
* Use humor. Laughter is not only the best medicine, it can be a powerful coping strategy, a symbol of hope, and cathartic.
* Designate a space for solitude. Choose a place that can be your designated space for times of solitude. For Examples Read on the balcony, meditate in a particular corner of the room.
* Schedule time for yourself. Take time off – don’t neglect the fact that everyone needs time to wind down and take a break or a staycation.

DQ: How are you assessing on learnings from enforced experiments around WFH?

Kunal Aman: Challenging times are a great teacher, and we are learning new things everyday. We are listening in to our customers and discovering how we can creatively apply analytics to meet their most immediate needs.

These are problems our customers never encountered before and, in many ways, completely new to the world. Towards this end, we have setup a special team internally to co-ordinate our company’s efforts to support our customers through the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has brought our ingenuity and innovation to the forefront, and we are now offering solutions that are aimed to solve the most pressing problems that businesses across industries are facing today.

DQ: This is a challenging time for managers. What advice would you give them?

Kunal Aman: As entire organizations shift to a new working environment, the focus should be on making the experience as productive and engaging for employees as possible.

Alleviate their fears: These are very stressful times for employees and managers alike, but managers shouldn’t forget to place their team’s situations and interests ahead of themselves. Facilitate regular dialogue with them and address their challenges and concerns directly even on sensitive topics such as job security & financial position of your organization. Ensure you are weaving in your organizational beliefs in the conversations and reinforce the values you believe in to reassure employees and give them confidence to be focused on what needs to be accomplished .

Adjusting to virtual environments: Despite the best of collaboration tools, lets acknowledge that virtual communications will be imperfect and will take some time to get used to for our employees, so a bit of patience and hand holding will help.

Create an atmosphere of clarity. Engage your employees by showing them how their work contributes towards the larger company goals and being clear on what their own objectives and goals are. Create platforms where employees can think innovatively as there are no playbooks to refer to in these pandemic times.

Place your trust in your teams: As managers, we might lose out on the constant oversight we had in our offices on each aspect of the work our employees are engaged in. And that may tempt one to become a micromanager – this is something I would advice against as it is counterproductive. It will cause stress in your team, disengage them and damage your reputation . This is the time to trust, and not doubt.

DQ: How does work/life balance work in a crisis like this?

Kunal Aman: One of the things that the pandemic situation has proved to the naysayers that knowledge workers can indeed work remotely in an effective manner. So, workers in the knowledge industry are much better off, as they are in a position to carry on business. On the flip side, many of us are struggling to maintain a healthy balance as we manage both work and domestic life under the same roof with little or no support.

Living spaces have been turned into makeshift offices overnight, making it almost impossible to disconnect. Work itself is much more stressful than usual with uncertainty all around us, and with no compartmentalization of paid work vs housework, parenting / care giving, couples especially dual career ones are often finding themselves facing burnout.

Managing these situations does require serious prioritization, time management and most importantly adjustments on everyone’s part. Organizations need to be empathetic & supportive towards their employees and employees need to get their domestic roles and priorities in order. The pandemic has reminded us about something basic and true about ourselves: we all have families. And we need to act like it. Striking the right balance is never easy, but we need to make it sustainable ultimately.

DQ: What are the policy responses you would give to the MSMEs and SMEs?

Kunal Aman: The MSMEs and SMEs are hit the hardest. The pandemic has them staring in the face of triple challenges: broken supply chains, labour which has migrated back already or is looking to go back home and liquidity crunch. Cash flows are completely squeezed with zero business happening in most cases currently.

While the government has requested to pay the workers through the ongoing lockdown, even when rules are eased, demand may not be back and restoring the supply chains is going to take time. In addition, operating under new regulations and maintaining the social distancing norms means MSMEs and SMEs will not be able to be as productive as before.

There would be a heavy reliance on the Government to pull the industry out of the current messy situation: through extended moratorium periods for loans, restructured loans with government guarantees, wage support for labour, doing away with penalties and such other relief measures.

DQ: How are you now facilitating digital work?

Kunal Aman: At SAS India, we have
* Rolled out work from home for all employees across India.
* Made all the checks to ensure employees are equipped to support customers from home. We are collaborating more than ever across functions
* We are leveraging best-in-class tools for calls, video conferencing to stay in touch with each other as well as with our customers and partners
* Fitness and mental wellness programs for our employees have been rolled out on virtual platforms to help our employees stay active and healthy
* Emphasized on lifelong learning through training programs and hobby development initiatives.

DQ: How are the latest technologies going to redefine workplace?

Kunal Aman: With WFH becoming the new norm, organizations will clearly digitally transform to make their employees more productive and their businesses more resilient. There will be a clear need to enable employees to be able to work remotely starting with equipping employees with better personal equipment such as laptops and mobiles to support increased remote working.

Tools that allow for collaboration and video conferencing have already been brought to the fore. With information leaving the company premise, there is additional need for security solutions so as to not compromise the integrity and privacy of organizational data.

Cloud will remain a big area of investment as cloud services adoption will help to improve the scalability and collaborative-ness of remote working while also keeping costs in check as organization shy away from capital expenditure. Investment in automation will increase as social distancing norms continue to remain in play and dependency on touch-based system reduces.

In the longer term, AI systems that can simulate live work environments and robots, that can recognize objects and handle tasks previously managed by people, may emerge as an investment area.

DQ: How do you plan for a future of ‘decent digiwork’

Kunal Aman: The likes of Uber, Airbnb have ushered in the platform economy and gigs are essentially a widely accepted western phenomenon that are slowly finding their feet in India as well.

As these trends gain traction and become more formal part of the economy and a critical part of our daily lives, both governments and private sector organizations have a role to play in ensuring the workers involved are fairly represented, their social protection needs are met & equal opportunity is given to all.

In a pandemic era, with anxiety about displaced labor, digital work whether crowdsourced or platform based, needs designed in ways that benefit the end worker and delivers on all of its promises, such as flexibile hours, the ability to work from home while not compromising on labour standards.