WFH, WFO, Hybrid or Something else?

‘Where there is a will, there is a way’, is something we learnt in our childhood and have used also many a times in our lives. The recent global Covid pandemic proved this again in many facets of our lives. I had shared some of my thoughts on this earlier, but today I want to share my views on the current hot topic at least for the IT industry, and that being — how the working model should be going forward??

But before I get into it, historically, in pre-covid days the work from home (WFH) option though very limited (especially for Indian SI organizations), but wasn’t unheard off. The clients we worked for, or our own counter parts in US, or organizations like IBM had been having WFH option, but it wasn’t an industry standard practice. We at BrainScale, also had WFH, because we worked on Azure Cloud and it didn’t matter, where you connected to the cloud from.

In earlier part of my career, we had raised the need of WFH many times, specially for those teams who didn’t had direct client interactions (purely because it was easier to manage there), but organizations were reluctant and was almost treated like it is impossible. One of the reasons given was how would one measure productivity (it is a separate topic on how effective where the productivity measuring options were really). Many client organizations went even a step further in their security needs and demanded setting up offshore development centers, with their own network, their own enclosed areas, their own security, not allowing external devices and not allowing anything but primitive phones.?

Covid disrupted this entirely and suddenly, the highly reluctant and even security paranoid organizations were forced to allow WFH for pretty much entire staff. Looking back at the last 3 years, I don’t seem to have come across any IT organizations being troubled with productivity issues, or timely delivery issues (over and above what they were already facing), or security compliance issues or any other issues, that were earlier given as reasons for not allowing WFH.?

I won’t say that transition into WFH was smooth and that there were no challenges. In India, we were not geared up for it for a few reasons. One of them being home network connectivity. While many of us did have good data plans on our mobile, but there were still challenges with stable home network. Then there were issues of family not understanding that we are working from home and there would be background noises during calls, or we being called for household work like ‘bazar se sabzi la do’ etc.?

With the pandemic under control now, the world of IT organizations is exploring to revert back to pre-covid work norms, but it is a big challenge now that people know that working from office is not the only way to succeed. TCS has been in news recently for their mandate to call everyone back to office and the resultant mass resignations of women employees. Even Infosys did the same, but limited currently to US and Canada employees.?

The choice that most organizations are playing with are hybrid, which is come to office for few days in a week, with most asking that to be 3 days in office and 2 as WFH. Some are saying that employees can do about 5–6 days of WFH in a month, but need to WFO on rest of the days. Each of the options of WFH, WFO or hybrid has their own pros and cons. For example — WFH actually can get more work done, as employees save on travel time and can work even when they are not feeling well. Side benefit to the community in form of lesser pollution because thousands of vehicles were off road. WFO allows people to bond together, especially required for junior or new team members, allows quicker problem solving and lot more cross team knowledge sharing. Hybrid, is obviously trying to find middle ground to get best of both worlds.?

Pure WFO is going to be difficult and actually doesn’t make sense anymore. I suspect that the reason why some organizations are insisting on work from office, is because of the heavy investments done in creating huge campuses, that needed to be maintained and kept in running state even when everyone was happily working from home. Minimum security staff, admin, house keeping etc. had to be at the campus and also infrastructure had to be kept in working condition. There is cost to all this. There is no easy way for organizations to get rid of such investments and hence the need to put them back to optimum use. When doing hybrid, organization should consider balancing out the staff distribution to ensure that they don’t end up having everyone coming to office on same days.?

Personally, I believe that there is actually a forth option that would probably work best and that being ‘flexible’ working days. Flexible working hours is not new to IT industry, but now it is time to replace it with flexible working hours and days. The key difference in what I am suggesting is that there are no fixed number of days in a week/month that employee should be in office, but rather there is flexibility. In this flexible system, the employee should be able to WFH on any day and even split 1 day in partial WFO and WFH. So one could go to office to attend a critical meeting, a client visit or things like that and still WFH for the rest of the day. One could go to office for weeks together, and not take any WFH days. They take WFH maybe when not feeling well, where one can work, but going to office and sitting their entire day is difficult. In such days, WFH allows one to work from the comfort of home and rest in between. Like the leave system, there can be a cap on total number of WFH days one can claim to avoid misuse.

It does mean that the managers need to be alert, but then weren’t they always were supposed to be? Project’s timely delivery still needs to be managed and with many projects being done the agile/scrum way, we are already doing smaller task breakdown, daily task tracking and work output/delivery is more important than being in office.

To summarize, flexibility to me, is the key, so one can really decide when to WFH and when to WFO. This way, I feel, we can be more productive and better manage our working hours and work output.?

What do you think? I look forward to hearing your reactions/comments.?