COVID-19 has brought huge health risk and has impacted economies across the globe. One of the key public health responses to the global corona virus pandemic has been social distancing that is avoiding large groups of people in close quarters in order to inhibit the spread of COVID-19. Along with shutting down offices, a major tactic for social distancing has been encouraging or requiring people to work from home. We don’t yet know the full impact the pandemic might have on our working practices, keeping greater numbers of people out of the office, but it’s likely that once a new way of working has been established, it will be hard to go back to the old ways.

Work from home has been on the rise for years with many organizations – from local authorities to long-established companies and start-ups from their own experience from starting from home garage – are encouraging and allowing employees to work from home. Researches show about 77% of remote workers experienced greater productivity while working from home, and 53% were less stressed. Remote workers also reported better health, and a willingness to work longer hours (*Soucrce WEF)

Companies and employees have now realized the benefits and are wanting to take the permanent advantage of the same. “Companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs—whether in another city or in the middle of the night—increase employee productivity, reduce turnover, and lower organizational costs.”, World Economic Forum.( A new study shows just how beneficial remote working can be)” Some IT companies like IBM, Accenture, TCS etc. already had this but now it is becoming acceptable norms among all the mid-tier IT companies. This now have extended to all corporate job across industry example FMCG, Automobile, Pharma, Engineering and Consulting companies. The values perceived are

• Reduction of fixed administration and operation cost,
• Availability of skill Resource pool across geography,
• Better productivity,
• Higher employee satisfaction,
• Opportunity cost efficiency of time saved beside commuting expense saving .
• Better and in fact larger availability of professional, focus work , higher and effective  digital collaboration.

“While prior academic research has studied productivity effects of ‘working from home’ that gives workers temporal flexibility, ‘work from anywhere’ goes a step further and provides both temporal and geographic flexibility,” as quoted by Dr. Prithviraj Chowdhury from Harvard Business School.

The only challenge in work from home is how to ensure employee social connect, enable morale is maintained, work as delegated is performed , there is no loss of productive time of employee and the business target and objectives are met. Above require regular interaction ,connect with all stakeholder digitally and having governance , process and technology so as to ensure above including  efficiency in business are measured and improved.

In market there are several tools to digitally monitor employee work time on system and company portals, however all they can be manipulated and have never been able to give fool proof result. Many large companies like IBM, HCL , GE, Amex etc have tested and continuously work to improve on same. Learning from that experience what is required is effective role and responsibility distribution, better and efficient work planning with clear deliverable, well established KPI broken to quarter/Month/week and day. There is need to have customized productivity measurement strategies involving element of monitoring employee progress regularly. One method is the daily check-in or team meetings.

Following is a high-level approach for implementing Work from Home on a long-term basis:

Identify and access current state of work and requirement of physical presence in office.

• Conduct discussion with various stake holders to develop the understanding of current state of governance process and technologies and capabilities of the organization.
• Review current organization roles and responsibilities.
• Review various existing requirements of tools technology and platforms.
• Conduct assessments with  interactions with various stake holders to understand role and responsibility and detailed work measures.
• Understand key performance indicator to achieve the business objective.

Define target state for work from home program.

Work with company stakeholders to define future state work from home program, risk and organization goal.

Develop a roadmap for implementation of work from home program.

• Design a work from home strategy and road map and take inputs from various internal and external stakeholders.
• Design a future state conceptual architecture, SOP, API, tools and technology to measure efficiency and meeting of organization goals.

To in fact implement this there is need for effective governance, process and technology design and implementation. Following are some of important element wrt same

Governance:

• Well defined organization strategy, long term and short plan
• Work for home risk management
• Designing well defined Roles and Responsibilities and KPI
• Defining Policies and Standards of  managing business
• Clear policy and standard for work from home
• Having well defined Measurements and Reporting mechanism

Process:

• Efficient processes for all business including ways of work  management , in line with project management approach
• Detailed Activity level result oriented Performance analysis.
• Regular check in and corrective action response

Technology:

• Designing and Implementing strong IT policy and processes to enable work from home
• Leveraging technologies like collaborative online meeting portal, web meeting, Email, Share drives, SharePoint, VPN enabled File shares.
• Enabling strong cyber security measures.
• Implementing and monitoring privacy controls.
• Use of auxiliary technology for effective work from home management.

Thus to enable effectively WFH, Companies need to have clear objective, strategies, they should be able to manage risk, have a clear Standard operating procedure, KPI measurement mechanism and an efficient reporting and monitoring mechanism, They should constantly measure and benchmark efficiency and cost saving and thus make and effort to improve over the years. If done correctly, work from home can boost productivity and morale but if done badly, it can breed inefficiency, damage work relationships, and even demotivate employees.

*source: “How employers and workers are benefiting from a shift to remote working” by the World Economic Forum.

co-author :Raghav Khattar, VIT-B-Tech 4th Year