On 24 March 2020, when India announced a complete lockdown for 21 days, senior management officials from one of the leading Global Capability Centers (GCC) with over 27,000 employees maintained their calm as they had been preparing for such an adverse event as part of their Business Continuity Plan for a period of time. Over the next four weeks, the team worked diligently towards adopting the future of work by transitioning all employees to work remotely, ensuring that customers’ work was not impacted by teams working remotely.
Since 2018, the GCC had been reviewing their real estate strategy with a focus to optimize its overall real estate spend as part of a ‘Workplace of the future’ strategy and also with an eye towards improving employees’ work life balance by gradually setting up processes and teams to work remotely periodically. To ensure that this does not become a meagre ‘nice to have’, a stringent approval process was created to ensure employees complied and worked remotely on the days identified. Further, by mid-2019, all employees were given laptops. This was another factor that worked in their favour to ensure a smooth cutover.
To enable remote working, the team had to battle its fair share of challenges. Leadership within the organization had to be trained to effectively manage remote teams, customers had to be convinced that this manner of working would not lead to data privacy issues or security breaches. Employees had to be trained on how to manage their time when working remote given that a large demographic of the population were young adults at the early stages of their career.
Policies were revamped to incorporate strong information security governance requirements, as were employee handbooks and the code of conduct manuals. As technology plays a strong role as an enabler in the future of work, a modernization exercise was also undertaken in parallel to help further ease the challenges.
From the initial days of the lockdown, periodic surveys have been conducted to assess the productivity impact; self-reported data was analyzed in conjunction with data from other automated sources to provide a consolidated view. The analysis continued to show very positive signs of marginal decrease in productivity; reduced need for leaves and flexible working hours added about 10% to the overall scale.
Older technology, power outages, internet connectivity, home office constraints and collaboration were some of the detractors that brought it down by about 11%, for a difference in productivity of approximately 1% from the pre-COVID times. It was also understood that a reduced requirement to take leaves would be a temporary phenomenon and the inclusion of reimbursements for home internet and even UPS devices would further reduce the impact of the detractors.