WFH – Permanent or Temporary
The impact caused by covid has been unprecedented and has caught everyone off-guard across the globe. Given the challenges faced in terms of organizational readiness during the lockdown, it has now brought remote work to the forefront of HR policy conversations.
Kiran explains that it is important to appreciate that for many organizations, it is still not viable for a long-term shift to work from remote locations and that not all roles are designed to succeed in a virtual working scenario. Hence, organizations will have to carefully address shifting towards WFH and assess the success factors through pilot programs, she says, maintaining that “However, given the experience during the crisis, it is expected that organizations will shift more towards hybrid models with a combination of physical workplace and remote work.”
Approximately 40% of Reliance Securities employees are likely to continue working remotely at least for some time after the pandemic. Even as the organization shifts to more remote work operations and explores critical competencies, the focus will be to ensure seamless employee collaboration digitally and also remain prepared to adjust employee experience strategies. Meenaa explains: “As a focus towards realignment of our business strategy, our set-up will continue to be remote and more flexible in the coming times.”
DBS Bank went ahead and conducted various experiments in the organization as part of Future of Work and Workplace and Workforce (F3W) and observed that WFH had many perks of flexibility, time saved in travel and democratization of employee participation during meetings. On the other hand, it also noted some negatives, such as prolonged WFH adversely impacting team bonding, collaboration and ideation process, and the feeling of missing out among employees.
“Taking the above observations into account, we have arrived at the 60/40 work from home policy, wherein all qualifying roles can work from home for up to 40% of the time. Employees can also choose to work from our satellite offices,” says Nagina.
CRIF Highmark has been working on policies encouraging good work-life balance and examining whether permanent working from home could only be allowed as per the need and nature of the job, especially when the world inching back to normal. Says Manisha: “CRIF Highmark has been futuristic and there was already a deliberation on smart working ways like a combination of working from office and home as a possibility in future for all of us at CRIF India. We haven’t seen this coming from our people so far; colleagues are looking forward to coming to the office and see each other.”
From the looks of it, flexible WFH seems to be destined to be a permanent fixture in the future.