Is India Inc. WFH ready?

It's about 14 months since the pandemic outbreak and looks like we all are now comfortably settled in the “new normal”. Just as a recap, companies did everything they could - starting from enabling working remotely, allowance for work from home set up, additional leaves, extension of leaves and so on. They even went to the extent of creating office like environment, virtually. While it looked and felt great initially, soon lack of real time connect and personal touch started impacting employee productivity. We, in India are simply not ready to adopt to this culture yet. Its very new and we are still developing our taste.

During this time, we boasted of uninterrupted business to our clients all over the world, the reality is we are functioning with fractured and aged infrastructure. India boasts of superior and highly competitive internet service, quality of connectivity is questionable and reliability - lesser spoken the better. The lifeline of all remote working is uninterrupted power supply and internet. While we already spoke about our pathetic internet connectivity, electricity is like fuel to run a vehicle. I may have a Porsche but what good is it without fuel to make it run. We get battered by extreme weather conditions which directly impacts power supply and internet connectivity. The other softer aspect is mental well-being as we haven’t really settled with that thought of WFH for such a prolonged time and no visibility to return to work timeline.

With no choice left, the country, like many others, will continue to work from home, however, the effectiveness is something we all need to reassess. Don’t be surprised if your organization is pushing to evaluate return to work, it’s actually for betterment of the work force and efficiency.

Getting India Inc up for WFH model in such a short period is a laudable achievement, it may still be better to leave WFH as a resiliency option - since there is no sight to improving our ailing support system.