Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

Ever since the lockdown, companies have been changing the way they do business. What used to be a luxury which was accorded to a few privileged employees some time back has become the order of the day. Work-from-home (WFH), though it may have its own pros and cons is now completely transforming the way businesses are being run. From the usage of collaborative, productive and instant messaging tools, arranging virtual meetings, ensuring no wastage with respect to time, money and effort w.r.t travel which was there earlier thereby using the gained time to update re/up-skill ourselves, WFH is clearly revolutionizing the way companies function in this VUCA world.

In terms of numbers, according to a MoveInSync report, until 20th March, 52% of total employees across India are working from home. Pune has the highest WFH with 63% followed by Bangalore with 61% of WFH employees. Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and NCR follow the sequence with 58%, 54%, 41% and 39% respectively.

So much so, that according to a report by Forbes, Microsoft Teams – the instant messaging collaborative app as part of the O365 suite of products, has seen a 775% increase in usage with over 44 million active users per day cumulatively generating over 900 million meeting minutes (includes audio and video calls). The emergence of the WFH situation has seen many companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Cisco offer their enterprise specific collaborative software solutions such as Teams, Hangouts, Workplace and Cisco Webex free of cost for nearly 6 months.

While some of them may look at this as a stop-gap arrangement (depending on the nature of their work), others are exploring the possibility of a WFH as a long term solution. Here I have explored some innovative practices and techniques which can be implemented by organizations (more specifically – IT/ITeS) in order to make this a big success.

Clear your Workspace: How often in the midst of our hectic work do we take time to clear off those clutter of mails occupying a lot of space in our mailbox? Maybe occasionally we do for professional mails, but personal? Doesn’t it give a good feeling seeing your mailbox empty? My suggestion would be to run a contest wherein employees can choose to delete their long-haul of unread mails in their inboxes (either professional or personal), post a selfie in the social media handle of the organization overlooking their empty inbox! This not only helps in having a clean inbox, but to an extent helps in a brand building activity! Who knows, this may go viral with employees of many other companies following suit!

Goal Setting for the week: It does help to set goals and try to accomplish them. More so in the case of an emergency situation which calls for WFH. Associates can be asked to give an approximate summary of the tasks they might be expected to do/they can possibly do this week; hence the supervisors will have an overall understanding of the work which can be done by the associate. It helps them to plan better for the days ahead also. A unified productivity tracker (like Microsoft To-Do) which not only helps in easy entering of the tasks, but also better viewing of the productivity dashboard among teams can be used rather than depending on static excel sheets which may be difficult to enter and also not uniform among various teams.