There can be no going back on WFH

You’d expect Awfis CEO Amit Ramani to be a worried man. His co-working company hires out office space at 70 locations in 10 cities nationwide and they’ve been empty since the lockdown began. Instead of being anxious, though, Ramani’s ebullient. He readily concedes the workplace has undergone a seismic shift and he’s drawing up a blueprint for the very different post-coronavirus world that looms. “We’re writing the playbook on office at home,” says Ramani, who’s drawing on experience gained in the post-9/11 era when he was working in the US and advising firms on working from home, a concept then in its infancy.

Ramani’s Awfis ‘Version 2’ will offer a range of services for companies looking to shift to a work from home or a partial WFH model, starting with assessing needs and offering packages that will include everything from ergonomic desks and chairs to tying up with telecom service providers and managing Internet connections at employee homes.

Many now working from home initially assumed the abbreviation WFH was a slight variation on WTF and shouldn’t be expanded in polite company. But in a few short months, Covid-19 has fast-forwarded the world into WFH mode. We all, except for essential services, WFH now — so much so for many of us weekday-weekends have blurred.

Newer apps like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams have emerged as the latest pieces in the puzzle that finally making WFH easier than ever. Coach and leadership development consultant Abhijit Bhaduri says it would have been an entirely different story if Covid had struck 15 years ago. “The country would have come to a standstill. Internet speeds were poor and so was video quality. Teleconferencing was not a great experience,” he notes. “Now we expect it to all work normally,” he says.

Zoom says 200 million people used its services daily in March compared to 10 million in December. Its share price has rocketed from $65 last December to over $150. Similarly, Microsoft Teams says it hit 2.7 billion meeting minutes March 31, triple the 900-million meeting minutes just over two weeks earlier.

WFH is making us rethink workplaces, work hours, work rules and work socialising and we’re only beginning to come to grips with these challenges. Do junior executives have large enough homes to create dedicated workspaces? Do they have a serviceable table, ergonomic chair, good lighting and powerful laptop? (Of course, that’s where companies like Awfis can come into play).

How do you keep out distractions? One publication bizarrely suggests: “Use headphones, a hoodie or even tinted glasses to create boundaries.” That doesn’t quieten barking dogs that interrupt phone calls or children playing in the background.

Tossing around

The corporate world has been tossing around the WFH concept for almost two decades without plucking up the courage to fully embrace it, despite mounting evidence it could actually be good for business and employees. One Stanford study two years ago with 500 employees at Chinese travel company Ctrip found WFH boosted productivity enormously. One strong WFH incentive for Ctrip was that living accommodation in Shanghai, where the firm’s based, is expensive and employees faced huge commutes.

Still, till Covid came along, WFH was still finding its way. But now, some newer US start-ups are launching without even a physical head office — yes, this could mean the end of the garage start-up. On the other hand, over 40 per cent of larger corporations in the US, till last month, had an absolute ban on WFH. And only about 5 per cent of the total working population there was working from home even a few months ago. In India, the statistics weren’t very different.

But Covid-19 has made such reluctance look now to be a thing of the past. Ramani reckons many corporations will opt for a three-tier structure in which employees might work from home or even work from a nearby business centre or co-working space. That would be one way for employees who find it tough to work from home but don’t want to commute to the other end of town. There will, however, be days when managers need to meet teams face-to-face. Says Ramani: “100 per cent WFH is not going to be the solution. A face-to-face connect will always be needed. For instance, I can’t hire a person and on the first day say, ‘Work from home.’” Adds consultant Bhaduri: “Digital is efficient, not nuanced.”

Still, Ramani adds in the post-Covid world, companies will have to drop their resistance to WFH. “Employees will say: ‘If I was successful during the lockdown period, why aren’t you giving me that choice now?’” Nestle chairman Suresh Narayanan told Fortune , “The long lockdown period has dispelled many of the notions associated with effectiveness issues while working from home.”

Similarly, India’s top infotech firms say that even though systems had to be rigged up in a hurry, their experiences with WFH have been more successful than they expected. TCS chief operating officer N Ganapathy Subramaniam says the IT giant doesn’t “need to have more than 25 per cent of its workforce at our facilities to make all the 100 per cent productive.” In fact, there’s a new buzz word for WFH: “location agnosticism.”

For employers the big advantage is savings on maintaining an office space and the cost of real estate — WFH will be another punch in the gut for the hard-hit Indian sector. Real-estate services company Anarock predicts far less office space will be needed in the future. It says, “Covid-19 will result in innovative solutions or rostered work shifts and timings. Many companies, depending on their nature of businesses, will reduce their dependency on utilisation of office premises and resources.”

Downsides too

Inevitably, there are downsides to WFH. For a start, bosses worry about what their junior colleagues are up to through the day. Are they flicking the remote between Netflix and Amazon Prime? In every office, even the most dedicated employees goof off sometimes so how do bosses ensure nobody’s slacking? Also, meetings are still required to generate ideas and boost team spirit. “It always helps to have people together for ideas.” Also, it’s useful “to look around and gauge how the ideas are received,” notes Bhaduri.

WFH, too, represents a big social shift. The office has been the place where we’ve spent most of our waking hours. It was also where we fraternised and gossiped with colleagues. In fact, many of the friends we’ve made are people we’ve worked with. We could, of course, experiment with the (free) website called “I Miss the Office” — https://imisstheoffice.eu/ — which is an office noise generator. But somehow, it won’t be quite the same thing.

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