Three years is more than enough for smart companies to figure out whether the forced work from home (WFH) engineered post the Covid-19 outbreak made sense over the long-term or not. However, opinion continues to be divided around the back-to-the-workplace versus work-from-home versus hybrid work.
While the smaller companies felt that employee productivity went up when employees were offered a flexible working schedule, the bigger players were skeptical of the same and actually toed the line of what most of India’s large IT companies have said – get them back to work as it is better for the employees’ overall health as well as that of the company.
Work from home isn’t career friendly
In fact, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna recently suggested that remote work could harm careers. He was of the view that these were best suited for specific individual contributor roles such as customer service or software programming. In the short-term, one could probably be equally productive, but the career does suffer, he said.
Of course, the manufacturing industry has made its opinion clear long back and with valid reason too. To expect an auto company to allow work-from-home for a shop floor doesn’t make sense and never will. However, there are some steps that even these companies can take in order to help employees feel more comfortable.
Reports said some companies such as CEAT and Marico have leveraged some pandemic-led measures such as removing the punch-in and punch-out system, allowing staggered return to work plans, fixed rosters and a work-from-home option for those who can fulfill their obligations with a computer and an internet connection.
It’s important to provide freedom of choice
In fact, some companies are offering employees the freedom to choose their own plan to move back to the workplace. They’re asking staffers to prepare a weekly roster of when they want to be at work based on their work requirements. The next step was to work from the office a few days a week to a couple of weeks a month.
Some others are actually doing this in reverse. They allow employees to select their work from home dates every month in a manner so that they are available for important discussions at the workplace and then do the fulfillment sitting at home. Some companies in Bengaluru are getting their employees to work at non-peak hours and allowing them to leave before traffic snarls.
“This way they can reap the benefits of coming to office, engaging with their colleagues and friends on a regular basis and also avoiding peak-hour traffic snarls by reaching home in good time and then switching their laptops back again for calls with stakeholders,” says a senior HR manager working with a global fintech giant in Bengaluru.
However, what makes this possible is the fact that several stakeholders in these companies stationed in other geographies are still working from home. The same cannot be said for others such as a big asset management company in Mumbai that expects its staff to be at hand in the workplace for discussions, learning sessions and collective build outs.
Of course, there are the big guns like Wipro that believe the future of work would be hybrid and have since adopted flexible policies. These policies are different from team to team and depend largely on the client requirements with key stakeholders deciding how the hybrid work program can be structured based on multiple factors related to work exigencies.
