CHENNAI: Lakshmi Vijayakumar is busy preparing a little snack for her two children. “I am actually working from home right now,” says the 42-year-old HR manager. While the novel virus has cast a pall over the world, affecting lives and livelihoods, it has brought families closer in an unexpected way. It has also given working parents unbridled time to spend with their children.
“My husband and I were thinking about putting our kids in daycare, before the virus took over. When the lockdown was imposed, we found out that we could work from home and meet our targets, even while spending quality time with our children,” says Lakshmi. “It does get challenging at times, but we have figured out ways to overcome that. This is, probably, the only silver lining in this crisis.”
Lakshmi is hoping to work from home even after the virus is gone. And she’s not alone. Millions of parents, who have been juggling work-life balance delicately all these years have realised that WFH is a boon. The sentiment has been endorsed by doyens of tech industry — Jack Dorsey, who heads Twitter, and Sundar Pichai of Google.
While Twitter has announced its employees can work from home permanently, Google has extended remote working policy till 2021. Express spoke to at least a dozen industries, employees, IT parks, real estate services firms and HR consultancies to find out what Indian companies have planned.
Industries secretary N Muruganandam
Only a small percent of IT and ITeS firms may continue work from home. In manufacturing and other allied sectors work from home is not a viable option and people are reporting to work slowly as production is picking-up.
Danfoss India President Ravichandran Purushothaman
Our company has an active work-from-home policy in place since 2013. We have also had a SoHo (Small office Home) arrangement in place for many of our sales colleagues outside Chennai. However, this situation has been a learning for us in business agility and out of the box thinking. In the new normal, Danfoss would restart its business with about 50% to 60% employees continuing to WFH, for a longer period of time. Since April, select production lines alone have been operational at Danfoss India Campus in Oragadam in Chennai to cater to the essential services requirements related to medical, pharma and food sector. Almost all our core functions continued to work from home, including R&D.
Olympia Group MD Ajit Kumar Chordia
Our company operates 1.5 million sq.ft IT part in Guindy, and will be adding another 1.5 million sq.ft by the year end. There will be an increase in demand for work space in coming days as flow of business orders into India is likely to spike. Work from home is only a contingency measures adopted by companies. We are going ahead with construction of four of projects.
CIEL HR Services Director Aditya Narayan Mishra
Companies are starting to show inclination towards candidates, especially for customer support roles, who prefer to work from home. We are getting enquiries for self-motivated individuals who can pull-off tasks from home. Opportunities are opening-up for people like qualified housewives.
Axis Securities CEO B Gopkumar
Around 75% of our employees are operating from home currently. Productivity across teams has improved due to cut down on travel time. As we await clarity and further advisory on the situation, our focus is on creating a boundary-less workspace, continuing work from home on 2D/ 3D/ 5D WFH model as well as rostering the employees for business functions.
Big.Jobs CEO Himanshu Geed
In the last 10 days alone, some top companies have contacted us, and we have orders piling up for our Urbandesk project, an all-in-one remote worker provisioning. For instance, Freshworks recruited 400 freshers, who under normal circumstances would have worked from the Chennai office. Now, Urbandesk will manage all the physical equipment and supplies that these remote workers need at home.