New Delhi: As the coronavirus pandemic spreads rapidly across the world, more and more companies are embracing the work from home option for business continuity.
While Twitter has taken the “unprecedented step” of making work from home mandatory, e-commerce major Flipkart has encouraged young parents in Bengaluru to work remotely.
But are all organisations ready to embrace the work from a home culture in view of the growing restrictions due to the spread of the virus?
Obviously not, especially those organisations whose nature of business demands a lot of travel and face to face interactions. An Ola or Uber driver would hardly be able to make money by sitting at home. The availability of advanced digital tools, however, allow a large number of organisations to implement work from home - if they plan well. Flipkart, for example, said that it is checking system preparedness for working remotely using digital/video tools.
“We are promoting the use of video conferences for meetings, including job interviews, and are temporarily avoiding events and training programmes that require large gatherings as a precautionary measure,” the e-commerce major said in a statement. Some companies have even started mock drills to test their work from home capabilities. Examples are fintech company Zeta and messaging and collaboration tool Flock.
Among the measures announced by the two companies include virtual onboarding for outstation candidates and virtual interviewing and hiring to the extent possible with the digitisation of some of their processes including the signing of employment contract, educational and awareness sessions on health and fitness through online mediums to ensure their health is not compromised even as they work from home, said Bhavin Turakhia, Founder and CEO at Flock and Co-founder and CEO at ZETA.
As a result of the measures introduced with the aim of restricting travel and face-to-face interaction in the face of dangers due to coronavirus, the demand for video-conferencing tools has gone up in India. Networking giant Cisco said that it has seen “significant growth” in the usage of its web conferencing and video-conferencing service Webex in India. (IANS)
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