Corona is changing the way we live and work

Corona is changing the way we live and work

As companies across the country roll out work-from-home policies, Sunday Times looks at the upside of remote working — from happier employees to more liveable cities.

SV Nathan, partner and Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte India, was to travel to Singapore last week for a work meeting. But the plan changed following coronavirus concerns, and Nathan took part in a virtual meeting instead. “It went off very well. In fact, I realised that I had saved 6 hours of travel time each way, suffered no jetlag and actually got more work done,” said Nathan, adding: “Things are not going to be the same anymore.”

He’s probably right. With corona having unwittingly sparked off a giant global experiment in mass remote working, the office is well on its way to being reinvented.

Yes, some companies may go back to their old habits, but many are waking up to the benefits that Work-From-Home (WFH) can bring, such as happier and more productive employees as well as lower overheads on real estate for employers. Even cities, as Vineet Jain, MD of Times Group, pointed out in a series of tweets, will become more liveable as pollution and traffic plummet.

Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and CEO of bike-sharing startup Bounce, is confident that the time is right for disruption. “There were a lot of inefficient things we used to do when meeting in person — the hi-hellos, the long coffee breaks, the commuting time. Now, the use of Zoom (video communication app) has cut out all that. Even clients are okay with video calls these days. So, a lot of behavioural changes will happen now leading to more efficiencies. Whatever demonetisation did for payments, I think the virus is going to do that for how we work,” he said.

Bounce has implemented a mandatory WFH for its 600 (corporate) staff across Bengaluru and Hyderabad for a week, and has plans to extend it. Over a dozen startups of various sizes, from the likes of Flipkart and Paytm to Unacademy, Meesho and Instamojo, have announced WFH for their employees It’s not just tech companies that are moving towards WFH. On Tuesday, the usually buzzing `Street’ on Hindustan Unilever’s (HUL) campus in Mumbai, will be deserted as over 4,000 employees of the Rs 38,000-crore FMCG major move to the tele-commuting and video-conferencing era. But it’s not a concept alien to Leverites. Managers usually work from home once a week and the processes and guidelines for the same are clearly defined. “As a global business, our teams consistently work in an agile manner as we already have robust systems in place,” said Sanjiv Mehta, CMD, HUL.

For a few years now, PwC India has been encouraging remote working and virtual working as a productivity measure. “Our leaders are role modelling working from home, which sets a powerful example,” said Padmaja Alaganandan, Chief People Officer, PwC.

And since most managers worry that staff who’re sitting on their living room couch will Netflix and chill rather than look at excel sheets, firms are also finding a way to ensure productivity. At PwC, employees are asked to clearly define the tasks they will perform with the team leader manager.

While assessing the feasibility of a particular employee availing of the telecommuting option, the nature of his or her role is taken into consideration — whether it includes activities that are measurable, whether the job requires concentration or can be worked on independently with minimal supervision or face-to-face communication.

While there are firms which may monitor employees’ laptops to judge how much time they are putting in at home, there are many who strongly believe people will do an honest day’s work. “Unwittingly, we are becoming a more trusting organisation. We set the metrics for people and we trust them to meet their targets. Somewhere in all this there seems to be a basic challenging of the notion that facetime will increase productivity,” says Nathan of Deloitte. The company, which recently introduced a work from anywhere policy called ‘MyFlex’, is also planning a remote working playbook which advises employees to designate a workplace at home, remain contactable and practise etiquette on video calls.

An employee of Flipkart’s tech-team said the mandatory WFH dry-run has not affected his efficiency. Another mid-level marketing executive at a payments startup said her team was doing most of their work remotely, without massive disruption. “There are shared drives for documents where people are collaborating, and there is an in-house Slack-like tool for closer collaborations. The tech stack can be accessed via VPNs,” she said, adding that a lot of meetings have been scrapped, saving time for everyone.

For employees, the biggest upside is greater flexibility. You may still log long hours but you have more freedom as to when you put them in. Female employees get the option of staying in the workforce while taking care of the family. What is less talked about is the change remote working can make to cities. It can reduce traffic and pollution (as was visible in Beijing and Milan during the lockdown). It can also upend real estate by encouraging the population to shift from crowded and expensive big cities to less populated areas.

But some old habits can be difficult to break. On a typical Friday evening, Pravin Jadhav, MD & CEO of Paytm Money, would wrap up work at his Koramangala office and head to the airport for a flight to Mumbai to meet his family. But this Friday, he found himself at home with multiple chat tabs open on his laptop coordinating with his Bengaluru team, all of whom are working from home due to the coronavirus fears. “This is probably the first time in three years that I didn’t go to office on a weekday,” he said, while sitting in his house in formal clothes. Jadhav said it was important for him to ‘get dressed up’ since he is so used to it.

“We are trying to be more disciplined and organised in terms of structuring the day. It’s only a matter of a few days before we get used to it ” Jadhav said.

Despite the challenges, one thing seems clear — remote working is an idea whose time has come.