Redefining Volunteerism: Part 9: New Age Woes-When time stopped ticking and it was a BOT!

This Work From Home(WFH) situation was something that Sunesh Abhinandan and his team from Corporate Quality Assurance had never dreamt about, even though their batch mates from the Insurance/banking/IT sectors kept talking about it. 

Sunesh Abhinandan, a typical millennial, had been interning at the CQA department while he finished his post-graduation in International Business Management with Pharmaceutical Affairs. That internship had metamorphosed into a role that had come effortlessly and he took to it like a duck to water. He loved the technicalities, was very eager in dealing with the challenges that came with the job, so when Narahari- his manager/surrogate mentor, told him that he was on WFH mandate, it seemed like Hobson’s choice. The inability to meet his senior colleagues and peer group, comprised of 8 of his teammates, who were called the “Turks-@-Work”, was something he had to learn to deal with. 

The announcement of the decision to WFH was made via email with a follow-up note that each Department in coordination with the IT departments would detail the elements of committing to deadlines, reporting, review, escalation had set the T@W aflutter. Although they were excited with the thought of not having to wake up early for the morning commute, many of them dreaded the late evening conference calls. The initial debrief of how the WFH would function and a mandate of using BYOD, security firewalls, server routings, and password protection mechanisms were no big deal but the virtual meetings and escalation line up did seem complicated. The IT department had held multiple sessions of the 5W’s + 1H in the days that lead up to the day when WFH had to begin. The Time office folks had clear indications about how the workdays would be calculated and accounted for. Although Sunesh was not clear about all that was meant, he had decided to take it as he went through it. That evening was uneventful. His office bag was perched on its usual stand. His phone went into the all-too-familiar slot, besides the bag. Sunesh freshened up and decided to get to his easel, for his pencil sketches. 

Day 1 of WFH: The workday began earlier than normal with 3 conference calls. Two were with his internal teams located at the manufacturing locations for closure to a Change-Control approval. The call-in details were available on his email and with a quick click on his screen, logging into the call was like snapping of a finger! Simple! The back-to-back calls lasted for 50 minutes each and the absence of the familiar aroma of coffee brought Sunesh back to reality! While he was at the kitchen counter making his cup of coffee, he realized that the notes and minutes for his next client meeting required a review. Grabbing that cup he settled down at his table and took time to reorganize the points for discussion and move the client’s tech-team into signing off the technical-term-sheet for the business agreement. All the points discussed in the morning internal call were realigned into the notes he had created for himself. He shot it out to his T@W for a review and sought additional points! All of his comrades responded within 20 minutes. Sunesh was elated. All of what was to be prepared seemed in order and in place. It was sent as an email to Narahari for an endorsement, which came back at lightning speed. 

Being connected in a virtual world with his team-mates and Narahari gave him a strange kind of solace. He did not have the luxury of dwelling on that emotion for long, as the client call would begin soon. He did manage to refocus on the to-do list even as he caught a strange message pop up on his laptop. “Have you logged on?” Sunesh managed to minimize that message even as he started to dial in to set up the call with the client’s tech team. The call progressed as expected, barring a few clarifications sought on the current crisis of product commercialisation and distribution network. All questions and answers from both sides ended amicably and while there was animation in that virtual ecosystem with having reached that milestone, Sunesh was aghast with the multiplying popup messages that seemed to jump up like popping corns on his laptop. 

He was oblivious to the cascade of events occurring in the attendance log-in system. The time office which was on its job for the first day had not had a signal from Sunesh. That system identified Sunesh as being away from work, even while he was accessing the virtual network of the organization. Sunesh was an "alien" in the network of the Time Office system!! That bot was inhuman!

Even as a battle raged between the two- Sunesh and the Bot (dealing with Time office), Sunesh longed for his desk at work with T@W! A string of copies of the emails, the discussions, and the login details from the trail of the IT department did not help defuse the situation for Sunesh. The approach the time office folks had was that all employees were to be measured by one scale and that scale remains static-rigid. Contextual roles, rising to the occasion during customer-facing discussions, and surpassing the frame-work of work-timing was not appreciated by this team.  This WFH was not pleasant, it was not cool and certainly was not stress-free! It was a reality he reckoned and vowed to volunteer in altering that for himself. Sunesh Abhinandan had to face that bot! At the moment all he could say was: What-A-Bout with a Bot!