Need of the hour: Collaborating effectively in times of Covid-19!

More and more organizations across sectors - be it banking, manufacturing, pharma or retail - are transforming digitally to stay agile and grow. One of the major aspects of these transformational journeys is to enable telecommuting of employees, so that office doesn’t mean a ‘space’ anymore, it means ‘a state of being productive’ irrespective of the place!

Telecommuting has been a key ask of IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) sector. On March 7, 2019, Ministry of Commerce in India allowed the provision of work from home (WFH) for employees working in IT Special Economic Zones (SEZs). With the recent impact of COVID-19 Pandemic, this turned out to be a boon for most companies, who already had standard WFH policies in place, thus instantly enabling their employees to telecommute.  Lightning response by Government and Civic Authorities to impose restrictions called for swift decisions.

It is imperative that companies provide all the apparatus that’s needed for resources to be online and efficient. This would include well-configured desktops/laptops, secure internet connections, firewalled access to servers, telephone connections, etc. which is basic. But beyond the physical infrastructure, I feel, that employees need complete clarity of protocols and processes, transparency in communication, and empathy from managers to understand the side-effects of remote working. Most companies have regular checkpoints to ascertain employees are not facing any issues to stay online and productive. These include virtual townhalls with leadership, regular meetings and catchups on tools such as Skype and Microsoft Teams and even daily scrum calls.

A leading digital transformation company in BFSI space launched a very powerful employee engagement campaign for encouraging and motivating its employees across countries. The campaign called #Workahomics celebrates the commitment of employees while working from home. The campaign rolls out different themes every week – from flaunting your fitness moves to showing how your workstation at home looks like, or even a new recipe you have tried at home. Employees click and share selfies and photographs and post on their social media accounts and the company’s engagement platform - Yammer. There are rewards for creative and engaging posts. The same organisation, as part of its employment upskilling initiative, has entered into a corporate tie-up with Udemy. This has become a major highlight in its employees’ work-from-home journey. With employees getting access to more than 3500+ courses online, it couldn’t be better timing to take up one.  More and more employees are using this time to upskill and upgrade themselves with new learning. With employees saving time on commuting to the office and displaying more efficiency during work from home, the learning graph in the organization, showed a sharp rise in March 2020, as they had some ‘extra’ time at hand to take up a new course.

Employees really appreciate and are grateful to the management, which decides to stand with them in the face of a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. I genuinely feel, that if an employee is going an extra mile to come to the office and ensure unabridged support to business-critical functions, it is the organization’s responsibility to provide for such employees. During the initial phase of the pandemic, support teams of almost all companies were required to be in office for a few days, despite lockdowns, to facilitate easy telecommuting for their employees. A few still continue to work from office premises with real-time monitoring dashboards and network operation consoles which support service or revenue-impacting functions of clients. Large infrastructure makes human intervention and availability necessary, making it mandatory for them to work from an office environment. It is, therefore, expected that the organizations provide such employees with the best of the provisions and amenities including safe and hygienic travel and hospitality.

We live in a very data-sensitive world and as the need of the hour special compliance provisions regarding information security and non-disclosure agreements, need to be activated. A fast-growing Fintech company made the acceptance of work-from-home guidelines and compliance document mandatory for its employees, as teams would be functioning from a non-office environment. Moreover, HR policies were tweaked to enable attendance regularization systems and record shift timing accordingly.

The COVID-19 Pandemic dented the industry in a big way. The agility and readiness that several tech organisations have shown in mobilising their resources to telecommute is commendable. Nearly 50% of India’s tech workforce, estimated at 3 million employees, have started to work from home as social distancing became critical to contain the spread of COVID-19. The impact of this crisis is likely to further accelerate work-from-home adoption in the IT sector.  One of the challenges this crisis has exposed is that it is globally pervasive. The industry has always been prepared for business continuity, based on a geographically constrained calamity, where critical business activities could be moved to another location or geography. However, as the pandemic happened everywhere across geographies, we had no option but to create a new normal in a matter of days. This is testament to the power of human creativity, collaboration and a will to persevere.

John Gaunt, Chief Human Resources Officer, Synechron

Then, would this mean the end of office space? I would say that’s still a few years away. Situations such as data breach, phishing or social engineering attacks, lack of robust monitoring, or absence of issue resolution for clients can spell bigger disasters if not handled carefully and appropriately.