Amid Coronavirus, another term being widely used is “Work from Home” but is India prepared for a Work From home culture? Will old bosses comprehend generation Z ideas? Can we achieve the same productivity from this new emerging yet necessary situation?
While for IT companies Work from home make perfect sense, working from a remote location via video conferencing and collaboration tools seamlessly connecting employees especially tech giants such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft’s workers. But workers with small and medium companies or non-IT sector enterprises are worst-hit as most of them are unaware or are unable to manage how to collaborate, how connecting tools work amid coronavirus pandemic.
Small companies from the education sector to corporate, all are scrambling to get their act together as threats of coronavirus reaches their premises, forcing them to send their employee home with old age laptops, poor hardware’s, slow internet connection and with no power backups like UPS. And are advised to connect through software like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Team, and Flock, etc.
Industry experts are of the opinion that halting operation can be easily avoided if we choose to shift towards work from home methods. For this non-IT staff needs to be trained for using digital software to connecting work. The training will take some time and may hamper productivity in the short run but is a win-win situation for the non-tech companies in the long run, in case any such global emergency arises in the future.
“The value of digital channels, products, and operations are immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now. This is a wake-up call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience,” warned Sandy Shen, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner.
Business that will be successful in shifting technology capacity and investment in digital the platform will be less likely to be impacted and keep their work running smoothly now, and over the long term.
“Videoconferencing, messaging, collaboration tools and document sharing are just a few examples of technologies that facilitate remote work. Additional bandwidth and network capacity may also be needed, given the increasing number of users and volume of communications” informed Shen.
The IT industry’s apex body Nasscom has asked the government to relax norms for a month to allow work-from-home for technology and back-office employees as a measure to deal with the spread of COVID-19 in India.
Networking giant Cisco said that it has seen “significant growth” in the usage of its web conferencing and video-conferencing service Webex in India.
The expert also said “due to COVID 19 pandemic, the corporate and educational sector is worst affected and in the country.
However, moving with the technology, the trend had never been a forte of Indian Companies let alone being ahead in the technology game. Many of the small or medium-sized business still do not think that technology can help boost business and productivity. The old manager can’t comprehend that the employee can work remotely but still deliver.
They love to see the employee slogging in the office for long hours in front of them. A lot is needed to be changed to accept remote working culture in India. This pandemic might bring the necessary change.
