New-Age Technologies in the Work-From-Home Regime
Rajkamal Vempati, EVP & Head HR, Axis Bank shared her views saying, “We were never shut down. The banking services were out there at the front and that had to continue. I would like to talk about our experience phases – first was BCP (Business Continuity Plan) which has an end date but this crisis doesn’t seem to have an expiry date. Initially, we were asking if work would happen. We overnight changed our learning modules as well. One thing is that phase where work can happen was a good phase but it went away very quickly. The stigma of working from home was present. People were sitting in the branches and managing the customers while at the backend people from home were helping. We were one of the largest banks who moved their operations at a large scale from work from home.”
Sharing employee’s worries in this crucial time and also reminding us about gratitude for technology available, Prasad Rajappan, CEO, ZingHR commented, “What happened is if you look from a corporate perspective, what has hit us hard was that corporates started worrying about the business and revenue continuity. What we realized was that it was the same for each individual. If the job will be there, are there going to be salary cuts or will I be retained? We have more than a million employees using our platform and we have various customers from the banking, pharma, and retail. The biggest concern people came out with is, where could we reach to the people. There has to be two communication. Technology helped hugely. What mattered most was the intent to be connected and then technology came in.”
On the other hand came up the discussion of communication to which Kaushik Chakraborty, Director - HR, Savills India stated, “Firstly as an organization we already had a self-technological platform which was available. We are in the service industry and every employee, for example, was taken care of. One of the things which we realized was that many of the platforms which were already there in place, for example, we had a Facebook workplace platform. The MS team’s platform etc. Other than the regular sessions that managers are supposed to take with their teams, for example, every week we had a CEO interaction happening. A space of empathy, communication, and clear questions people had. Every day at 4 pm we had a lockdown learning session. It was an internal learning session going live for any of the employees, and then we had our fun sessions every Friday evening.
Rightly so and with a direct statement Anjali Chatterjee, Head - People & Culture, Air Asia India said, “What we did is that we realized that the youngsters needed to be connected daily. We had the technology but we also needed the human touch. People need human touch. We made a system where every employee everywhere, every single day were given loads of empathy and concerned questions. That worked in our favor and as we go through partially opened, we continued telling managers, training managers about showing empathy. Giving people their space and that is helping people a lot. One thing today people are concerned about is not coming to the office. The connection we had with them was the key and empathy played a huge role.”
On a conclusive note Kartik Radia, Managing Partner, Mazars India, shared his inputs saying that “Using technology in work life, and I think most of the other panelists have covered that how tools are to be used, I think to connect with people the face to face experience is completely different from the work from the home office environment. While we are making this more of a permanent culture in the way of life, the work from home allowances for employees when setting up the infrastructure, bringing them the virtual experience of working from home. Almost every business in times like this needs to have a people-centric business plan which keeps people in the center.”
