Name notwithstanding, CoronaOven, the manufacturers claim, is an all-rounder as it can get rid of a wide variety of germs, including bacteria and viruses.
It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that this may, one day, end up on your shoe stand to disinfect groceries from outside.
The Bengaluru startup, which invented it, claims that even French President Emmanuel Macron’s residence has one.
Several Bengaluru homes, hospitals, police stations and even the airport have installed it, according to its inventor, Log 9 Materials.
If necessity is the mother of invention, the present and near future could well prove to be the grandmother of many innovations.
The rules of engagement among humans are also undergoing many changes. And the presence of humanoids among us more than ever before could be one of them.
“It was a novelty all these years. But because of the coronavirus, robots will be seen in offices, restaurants, hospitals and other places in large numbers in the coming years,” says Rajeev Karwal, MD, Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions, the company that came up with humanoid robots; RoboJulia (named after Hollywood actor Julia Roberts) can serve three tables at a time and RoboDiCaprio can man reception desks.
Robots may not supplant humans in many other aspects of our lives and not many can afford a disinfecting oven, but innovations, safety concerns and a bit of paranoia are forcing changes happening at a rapid pace and they are probably here to stay.
The office space, for instance, may undergo a complete transformation. It may no longer be sardine-can like, with employees getting more square feet per person and a bit more privacy, thanks to ‘social distancing’ entering the office design lexicon.
But the desks may smell more like bathrooms due to regular bouts of ‘sanitisation’.
The concept of ‘anytime, anywhere using any device’ workplace has been in existence for a long time with technology evangelists talking about it for even longer, but it was probably held back by the fear of taking a collective leap forward.
Right smack in the middle of a crisis, there is realisation that they may have little choice.
Slog from Home
After taking over as the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer decided to do away with work-from-home (WFH) in 2013. She had her reasons.
Mayer wrote in an internal memo to employees that working side-by-side was important for “communication and collaboration” and that some of the best decisions and insights came from “hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings”.
Her biggest argument against WFH was that often it led to the sacrifice of “speed and quality”. “We need to be one Yahoo!” and it comes with physically being together, she argued. Today, Mayer would be branded a yahoo.
In a 2014 paper, the researchers at Pennsylvania State University, US, said that people felt less stressed working in an office than at home.
This was after they tested cortisol, a biological marker for stress, among 122 workers during the weekdays and weekends.
But more recent studies, after the mass lockdown, seem to suggest that people are in favour of working from home, even if their stress levels are higher.
The indications from the jobs market, which is anyway going through a crisis, point to the fact that many of the jobs on offer are related to remote-working.
According to JobsForHer, a career platform for women, WFH is becoming the norm for the majority of the workforce.
“Our platform saw women mostly applying for job roles like journalist, editor, content writing, tele-calling, customer services, QA Testing, etc. We also observed that education, IT, recruitment, internet/e-commerce and advertising and PR were some of the most popular industries,” says Neha Bagaria, founder and CEO, JobsForHer.
With more and more people wanting to convert a room or a corner into a workspace, companies have jumped into the fray to cash in on this potentially growing business.
For instance, Awfis, which offers coworking office space and on-the-go mobile offices, has come up with the concept of Awfis@Home under which it offers toolkits for a price. Besides providing ergonomic furniture and high-speed broadband connection, it also offers office-like-design at home, including cubicle-like settings. “WFH was considered an experiment. It is tried and tested now, and it is here to stay.
The companies have clearly understood that they need to think about bringing down costs and WFH is one way of doing it, and employees, having proved that they can be as productive at home as in the office, can be confident of this becoming a permanent concept and hence spend money on having their own office at home,” says Amit Ramani, founder, Awfis.
Awfis is not alone in seeing profitable opportunities in the WFH space. For instance, a Gurugram-based furniture brand launched a line of WFH tables that can be adjusted to stand or sit while working.
Whether it is Facebook or Google at the world level or large companies like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in India, they clearly foresee a significant number of their employees working from home in the future. In fact, TCS has announced that 75 percent of its 4.5 lakh staff would permanently work from home by 2025. Currently, their share is around 20 percent.
Getting used to the new normal will not be easy. You will realise that doorbell will ring at the most inopportune time, your kids may crash your video conferences or want to talk to you just when you are about to finish something important, and you may want to rush to your kitchen to check your oven or taste something that is cooking and there will be a thousand other distractions. But it’s time to better get used to them. These would be just another day in the office.
Away from gyms and parks, people are already finding ways to stay healthy at home, thanks to mobile apps. Delhi-based Shweta Shinde, 35, has roped in her pre-teen sons—bored of sitting at home—to join in her live workouts with FITTR, a fitness app. “I don’t want them to just watch TV all day, so I make them exercise with me whenever I attend live workouts. They’re fun to do and keep my boys active,” she says.
Yoga and Zumba dance workouts on Zoom may become a regular affair. “Life, as we know it, has changed and the best thing we can do is adapt to the new normal. That includes fitness and nutrition,” says Jitendra Chouksey, founder of FITTR.
According to him, they have come out with various exercise routines and nutrition plans that can help people stay fit even within the confines of their homes.
But the stress of working at home is real and several surveys in recent times point to just that. “I think initially for many of us, this (WFH) was a nice consequence. Of not having to commute, sleeping in a little longer, not worrying about getting dressed for work, switching between work and home chores and being able to spend time with the family. However, I believe for many the honeymoon phase is over! We are social beings, after a while we crave engagement with our peers and the world around us,” says Aparna Samuel Balasundaram, author and behavioral health consultant.
According to her, many may miss the ‘rituals’ of going to work as for some it was a space to even escape the humdrum of home life and perhaps even get in touch with the other sides of their personalities that perhaps emerged only at work with peers and colleagues.
“With the boundaries between work and home getting blurred, people are now realising that there is no ‘off’ switch that they used to mentally turn off all these years,” she says.
Getting Lean and Mean
Neetish Sarda, founder, Smartworks, one of India’s leading workspace providers, says he had never imagined such rapid workplace transformation.
According to him, enterprises are looking to ensure and maintain the highest levels of hygiene so that everybody feels confident about doing their job while staying healthy and secure.
“Future workspaces will be about decongesting offices, from rethinking density to spaced desks, visual signs/marks between workstations for social distancing, and reconfiguring common areas to limit the number of people at a time and reinvent the offices,” explains Sarda.
Smartworks’ clients are asking for 100 sq ft space ratio per employee to ensure proper distancing between workstations and they are also looking for multiple offices instead of one big space to ensure business continuity in case of any uncertainty.
While some are providing office furniture (a table and chair) to employees on need basis to enable them to carry out WFH, reimbursement of internet bills with upgrade plans have been prioritised.
Companies admit that the current crisis has been a wake-up call.
For instance, BridgeLabz, a Mumbai-based software solutions company that provides skilled engineers to startups and enterprises, is moving 100 percent online, from having all its operations offline with over 1,500 learners in its two labs in Mumbai and Bengaluru.
“While we always believed that a major part of the programme could be conducted through online mechanisms, we were ‘stuck’ with our offline mindset. The lockdown changed everything. Suddenly we were forced to question every aspect we held unchangeable. And within a week of the lockdown, we had taken all our programmes completely online,” says its founder Narayan Mahadevan.
‘Location location location’ is perhaps the most beaten-to-death phrase when it comes to the deciding factor on the price for a house or office.
That may undergo a change, according to Ramani of Awfis. “It will now be location, space and time. Corporates now don’t want to be in a single location and they may look for smaller offices in various parts of a city so that they can be nearer to their employees and also protect themselves from future shocks. Demand for co-working spaces may go up,” he says.
Office space is something that companies are definitely thinking about scaling down or spacing out. Take BridgeLabz, for instance. “Today we have over 6,000 sq ft-sized places and we will only probably be able to do with 1,500 sq ft in the new locations,” says Mahadevan.
This sits with recent studies of Indian workplaces. For instance, according to a survey by Colliers’ India—a real estate professional services and investment management company—45 percent of office-space occupiers foresee only up to 30 percent of their employees returning to the workplace even after the relaxation of lockdown restrictions.
Sixty percent of occupiers plan to accelerate technology adoption in order to reduce the need for physical meetings.
Commercial space renting companies are under pressure to reduce rates and some have already announced concessions.
But some argue that as companies may spread out rather than being bottled up in one large campus, there would be a huge demand for standalone or coworking spaces in the future.
But in all this, there is another side to it all that employers have to take care of.
A US employees’ survey by Eagle Hill Consulting recently revealed that just a month into the pandemic, 45 percent of American employees reported feeling “burnt out”.
Some of the reasons given for it were workload (45 percent), juggling professional and personal lives (35 percent), and lack of communication with employers (32 percent).
Thirty-six percent of the people said their employees were not doing enough to stem the feeling of being burnt out.
Some companies are already taking steps to make their employees feel more “at home”. JobsForHer, for instance, has found ways to spend some “fun time” with its employees. It has designated time for employees to exchange stories on how they are coping with the lockdown, including their kids’ school load.
“We also encourage our team members’ families to get involved by showcasing their talents in singing, poetry, etc. We even celebrate birthdays, play virtual Antakshari and quizzes,” says Bagaria.
As for the service industries, Pravin Agarwala, founder of Better Place, one of India’s largest blue-collar staff management organisations, says companies are adapting to new realities and multi-tasking is in. “All workers in service industries have to adapt to new guidelines. For instance, security folks have to now manage beyond just movement etc. They have to look at deliveries within the premises, co-ordination with stakeholders while ensuring that guidelines are adhered to. In some cases people have started performing multiple roles due to shortage of resources,” says Agarwala.
There is a huge emphasis on skilling and reskilling now, say experts. Employers would now prefer a resource pool that is skilled and readily available. Service industry staff-providers may have to go for employability-driven training in participation with employers and most of it would be before joining the job.
The demand surge for blue-collar workers can come in fits and starts depending on the situation. But they have to be ready.
Agarwala realised it recently when a logistics customer, who is into deliveries of essential goods across the country, got in touch with Better Place with a demand for 2,000 well-trained people. “As part of onboarding, we ensured that they were all well trained on all the facets of safety measures. We also equipped them with face masks, sanitisers and face-shields and others,” he says.
Future Tense
A few myths have been busted and boundaries stretched. For instance, technologies were in place to have video-conferences over various platforms and the bandwidth has been extended.
But hardly anybody imagined that the whole world would be working from home and using these technologies almost at the same time.
Working from home was looked down upon by employers for years now with many fearing that it would encourage employees to slack off at home.
Even many employees felt that the office atmosphere allowed for creativity and made it easier to reach out to each other for solving problems. Not any longer.
For skilled workers who have lost their jobs, going out there and working as freelancers is the only way out. At least until the various sectors of the economy pick up pace.
And WFH is virtually the only thing to do. With more and more companies looking to great work but without the overhead costs that they have to incur on the regular employees, it seems that freelancing may have undergone a change forever with companies jostling to pick the best of talents for a price that they are more comfortable to pay than ever.
As for those who have kept their jobs and have experienced some form of pruning of their salaries, it is just the beginning, warn experts. Employees should get used to looking at the pay packages closely, and slicing and splicing each expense.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in fact, indicated recently that the pay packages of those who work remotely would be looked at closely keeping the cost of living and labour.
It is bound to happen worldwide too. That will not mean that expectations from the employees would come down.
A phone call answered a little late would be frowned on and a 10.30 pm office meeting wouldn’t be considered odd. After all, the employee has been at home the whole day and gets paid for it!
The effects of the pandemic may remain daubed on the consciousness of this generation for all their lives, but not becoming a hostage and carrying on with life as well as one can is the only way forward.
Balasundaram says we have to “reframe” this time in our lives. “Yes, we have been forced to hit the pause button and learn new ways of being that cause us anxiety. But, can we take this time to introspect, spend precious time with family, reconnect with ourselves and the people around us? Being able to channelise our nervous energies into something positive and creative, will have a calming effect on us.”
That could be a goal worth striving for.