As India goes into work-from-home mode, creating a professional work environment at home similar to one’s workplace isn’t all that easy.
Getting the right hardware and software tools, dealing with a fluctuating Wi-Fi speed, while you attend to gazillion video calls and deal with spouses, kids and without house help all at the same, is beginning to look challenging for many. While collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, and video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Skype and Google Hangouts have always been available, Indian workforce is yet to turn online-first and in most cases grappling with tech issues which typically be handled by the IT department at offices. Collaboration among team members, brainstorming, less effective work, fewer discussions with co-workers due to time limitations, are just a few of the harder-to-measure things that employees miss on when they work remotely, as per a survey conducted by Benglauru-based analytics firm Discover Dollar within its team.
Despite the downsides, employees cite benefits. “Productivity has increased over the last one week and since we are saving on our travel time, our workload has gone up,” said a 29-year old Bengaluru-based Infosys employee who did not want to be named. But few teams have faced technical issues like accessing client data through a virtual private network or VPN , he added.
This entails huge cost-savings. In the long run, if we subtract the real estate and office transit costs – and overcome our inherent and rather regressive doubts and suspicions about employees WFH – we are staring at an opportunity, not a challenge. Today, in the middle of lockdown, we’re carrying out three times more WhatsApp-based transactions than we were a day before the lockdown.
India's huge IT industry struggles with work-from-home
Amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown when all organizations in the IT sector are engaging its employees in remote work or work from home, a study has revealed that only 0.2 per cent workforce in the IT industry is highly productive.
"The industry has been scrambling to set up its own business continuity plan," said R. Chandrashekhar, a retired federal government official and a former president of India's IT services lobby group, NASSCOM. About 99.8 per cent of the workforce in the information technology sector is incapable of working from home and only 0.2 per cent are 'Work from Home' champions and showcase high productive attributes, according to the study by research-backed innovative venture SCIKEY MindMatch. As every individual is driven by a different force and identifying an employee's strength and weakness, plays a crucial role in enhancing remote productivity, companies can enhance the productivity of their employees on the basis of their personality types, the study opined.
India's home ministry, in guidelines issued, advised states to exempt essential IT and IT-enabled services from the national lockdown. NASSCOM, the lobbying group, said several states had listed IT and e-commerce among essential services that are exempt.)
This may be the beginning of the end of employment as we know it, leading to the core of an organisation shrinking to a handful of people, supported by subject matter experts (SMEs), who could work, on contract, for 3-4 non-competing firms. The simplified processes will make the lives of our customers easier, and create entrepreneurs out of employees. All the while making firms with improved efficiency and cost structure even more competitive.
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