Reimagining HR in a post covid world

Excerpt from the speech of IRIS Social Media Manager Services Limited Chairman, Shri Vinod Agarwala at the Company AGM held on September 25

Today I want to dwell on the impact on organisations and how it may have changed the #workplace for ever. Most organisations have had to make adjustments in this post #covid world.?Including IRIS. In this post covid world, employees are beginning to define the terms of their engagement with the employer. Today, at IRIS, we are reimagining HR .

Because it is not just about work from home. It is work from anywhere. It is work on my terms, the employee’s terms.

You may have seen the statement attributed to Google CEO, Sundar Pichai that Google has too many employees who do not work effectively or with focus. He is reported to have said that Google's productivity isn't where it needs to be.

You may also have seen the tweet of Wipro’s @Rishad Premji who has drawn attention to the increasing cases of moonlighting by industry staff, he calls it cheating.

At Apple, a revolt seems to be brewing against the 3 days in the office directive with employees urging the management to leave such decisions to their line managers.

Post Covid, employee behaviour has changed and not all for the better. From the statements of Mr Pichai and Mr Premji, one could conclude that many employees view the freedom to work-from-anywhere as licence to do what they please.

Here at IRIS, many of our colleagues are simply reluctant to return to office and understandably so. During the pandemic, many of them had moved to their respective native places with their families. Their reluctance to return to Vashi is understandable. As a consequence, on any given day, less than 20% of the office is is occupied.

I don’t think we will enforce mandatory attendance in office so long as work is getting done and the managers are satisfied with the work of their subordinates. For this to work, we propose to continuously train our managers to get better at monitoring the work-from-home who seek the flexibility to work at a time of their choosing.?

In this work at anytime world, an employee can take a break in the afternoon to watch a serial on TV or catch a matinee or to run an errand.?Traditionally, in most companies, the metric used by HR to monitor employees was to keep track of hours spent in office. This is obviously no longer meaningful.?The timesheet culture has to give way to monitoring if the expected outcomes have been delivered.

With the concept of work hours becoming redundant, we need to revisit the concept of leisure and vacation and work related perks. In a spatially dispersed labour force, we are figuring out how to keep employees engaged.?We are also asking ourselves fundamental questions about work life balance in a flexi time world. The old 8 hour rule wont work.?

Here at IRIS, we have always tried to be ahead of the curve. If employees can work from anywhere and at anytime of their choice, and we have the systems to manage them, it gives us the confidence to recruit from anywhere. In the battle for talent, the world now becomes our catchment area.?Where we recruit from will change, when we recruit will change, how we recruit will change.

We will recruit more women, especially stay at home mothers. A work from home, work at your convenience framework, is a situation made for educated stay at home mothers. According to a research study published by the prestigious Atlantic magazine, in the USA where opportunities abound, as much as 43% of women with children leave their jobs. A #worldbank study says that between 2010 and 2020, the number of?working women?in India dropped from 26% to 19%. Following Covid, economists in Mumbai estimate that female employment plummeted?to 9% by 2022, says a Bloomberg report.

We will recruit outside the big towns and cities. What Covid has also done is to force large parts of the work force to try and stay close to home where they may have a support system. Many of our own staff have gone back to the towns or even the villages they hail from. By building a referral system to spot talent and by offering such talent, Mumbai like #compensation , no matter where they may be, we will be able to significantly improve the quality of the technology talent at IRIS.?

Bear in mind that your company does not need to recruit in large numbers like the big IT services firms. We have confidence in our approach.?