We hope this finds you healthy and safe.
Like us, you might be inundated by emails from all kinds of companies sharing their plans to face the Coronavirus outbreak.
Since we’re not epidemiology, pharma or healthcare experts, we will refrain from offering our $0.02 on how to come out of this crisis. Neither do we wish to add one more email to your inbox.
Instead, we will focus on just one aspect of Covid-19 response in this post (which will also be exercepted in our regular month-end email newsletter GTM360 News due out in a week), which is Work From Home.
As all of us are aware, WFH is one of the key strategies proposed for fighting the coronavirus outbreak (the others being Physical Distancing, Social Distancing, Lockdown, Janata Curfew, and Shelter In Place).
Right from the inception of GTM360, our marketing campaigns have been targeted at western markets. This necessitated late night work (according to IST). At the time, very few office space providers in Pune were able to accommodate our needs for working late nights and early mornings. One of them even asked us, “Why on earth would anyone work at 10PM?”.
After we moved to the international business center chain Regus, we could use the office 24/7 but the AC would be switched off at 7:30PM and all eateries in the building would shut at 9PM.
With the mushrooming of new-age coworking space providers like WeWork in the last year or two, things have changed.
But our early years’ experience made us institute a Work From Home option for all our employees. Right from our inception, all our employees (and contractors) have laptops, high speed broadband connectivity, separate workspace, and the other accoutrements of WFH.
This has stood us in good stead now that the Covid-19 outbreak has made Work From Home compulsory. The move to WFH has been seamless for us.
For ages, we’ve been conducting meetings with customers outside Pune and India remotely via Google Hangouts, Zoom, and other popular videoconferencing platforms (see sidebar). So, it has been relatively easy to do the same with our customers inside Pune.
Based on our experience, there’s one major advantage of WFH that we wanted to share with you: Greater ability to attract better quality of talent. (This is not rocket science. Anybody who has attempted remote workforce would probably have realized this benefit.)
There are many talented people who find it difficult to work from an office, amidst personal commitments and the hours spent in commuting in all metros and even many Tier 2 cities in India. As a result, they stay out of the workforce. That said, they do have a few hours to spare everyday and are more than willing to put them to work – but only from home. If WFH were possible, they benefit and their employers benefit.
We’ve hired many such people through the years. They’ve all been uniformly professional and highly productive even under minimal supervision. It’s cliched to say you must trust your employees, so we won’t say it. Besides, in our experience, it takes more than trust to succeed with WFH. Contrary to what many people may think, working from home is as much work as working from office.
Why? Just because somebody WFH doesn't mean they're not "*real* key workers". That said, nursers, doctors, et al are more than just that. I don't know a single phrase for what they are but it includes "putting lives on the line for the service of others".
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) March 21, 2020
Talking about advantage, there are of course disadvantages of remote workforce. But now is not the time to get into them when WFH has become a health and statutory requirement.
Now is the time to make Work From Home work despite the disadvantages.
If you’re apprehensive about the regulatory mandate to transition your operations to WFH, fear not.
Through our years of working with remote workforce, we have garnered a few best practices for making WFH work. We’re happy to share them with you and help you to make your company’s transition to WFH as smooth as possible. Should you require any assistance in this space, please feel free to contact us.
Before signing off, we wish all our customers, prospects, well-wishers and other readers of this blog the strength and fortitude to tide through the Coronavirus lockdown with good health and spirits, and with the least amount of disruption to your professional and personal lives.