Employers and workers initially converged on this issue due to fear for loss of business and fear for layoffs.
The new method attracted the attention of business establishments due to its promise of cost effectiveness.Employees also saw the benefits of this practice as a way to get away from daily chores like ‘preparing’, travelling’ and even ‘going to work.
The flexibility in working hours reduces boredom from the rigid routine.
However, this was only temporary as profitability evaluations were questioned.
Although the corporate body was able to take the expense of fixing the workstation at an employee’s home in stride, it wasn’t enough to make a phone and laptop available.However, the three-pronged challenge of monitoring, supervision, maintaining team spirit via remote communication, and keeping the work efficient seemed daunting to the leaders.
The theory that working at home allowed for greater concentration, and thus a higher output per hour of time, was based on a theoretical assumption.However it has been shown to be a false deduction as many workers feel casualness and complacency which negates this logic.
Working from home has become a popular option for people in the lowest half of an organisational pyramid.This is because they enjoy the benefits of a low-stress work environment where senior staff are not physically on top of them.
The trend is also being reported in advanced Western countries.
The policy planners and strategists are a small part of a business organization.
However, they make up a very low apex.
Covid has had a negative effect on the organization.There is a lot more pressure to make it ‘flatter’.To allow the executive below to delegate decision-making, they are working in highly distributed structures.
As a consequence, the seniors of the mid-segment would be more accountable as they will now have to be the hands on “team leaders” and be expected to get to know their fellow men better than ever before.
Their emotional intelligence must be sufficient to manage the Covid emergency’s surrounding chaos.
This must, in a sense, lead to greater efficiency.It could even be considered a “gift” of the terrible pandemic.
Covid has certainly led to an “evolution” in management.Its strands are easily identified.
Since evolution is always positive, it’s not surprising that the win-win model of working is quickly becoming accepted by other businesses.
It was easier for IT-based businesses to shift to “work from home”, but this was complemented by the growth of digitalisation and online communication, and consultations, which all had the effect upgrading supply chains, production, and delivery.
Both services and products were subject to greater quality control pressures because customers, impatient with the physical limitations imposed by pandemic, demanded complete satisfaction from their supplier.They also tende to reject suppliers whose quality they found unacceptable.
The fact that online retailers have grown in general speaks to the fierce competition for quality they faced as they tried to maintain their edge.
The second, aside from quality, is the confirmation of the modern business principle that states that the individual was the center of all productivity.
To get the most out of their existing staff, human resource managers must recognize the importance of upskilling and recalibring.
The introduction of technology-aided production and distribution, promotion, but the strategy formulation, which became a challenge of both intellect and knowledge, was a solely a call to the leadership.It required swift human responses for any contingency and a decision about possible course corrections, necessitated due to the faster pace of change in all aspects of business.
Covid’s third transformative effect is the rise in entrepreneurship and startup growth.This was due to the changes that the business environment offered those with ideas and insights into how to make the new demand-supply relationship work.The Covid crisis opened up a path to growth.
This is the trend setting approach of young people who start their own business.It is grounded in innovation and new knowledge, and it will continue to be a success.
Where the ‘production’ is also dispersed, the ‘segments’ of the ‘factory’ would be identified more and more with individual workers or artisans and special methods of coordination among them will have to be evolved by the leadership.
‘Supervision’, in the process, would become an arduous task and not a cushy function any more.In organisations which had the need to keep their operational information confidential, the employees working online have to be specially trained in security and reminded of the importance of putting the hard discs and pen drives under lock and key and following the login controls and password protection drills without fail.
At the corporate headquarters, the security cell may have to be strengthened.
Performance evaluation of the seniors must rest on their having a closer personal knowledge about the hands working for them.This is vital since needs of the employees compelled by health contingency in the family, including a sudden request for change in the set timing, may have to be accommodated.
The availability of seniors online at odd hours is as important as the summoning of the employee for a task outside of the fixed hours.Covid has reinforced the Indian theory of ‘paternal nurtural management’ which unlike the Western capitalist thought, calls for an empathetic boss-subordinate relationship even beyond the workplace.
In fact, it is the performance evaluation of ‘seniors’ by the corporate apex that has to become stringent — in the light of these new yardsticks of judgement applying to them.
Both in the US and India, the hybrid model that combines physically attending office and working from home has been made functional in a long-term perspective, but for the senior levels of the organisation, being at the corporate headquarters is becoming a necessity — again in the interest of successful policy and strategy formulation.
In-person deliberations have no substitute as far as macro planning is concerned — board meetings do not serve their purpose in a virtual format.The evolving practice would favour return of the leaders to the head office with a certain number of supporting personnel being also present there in person.
This has to go with a planned mix of other employees in ‘shifts’ working from office or home in the best interest of productivity.In view of the additional mutants of the Corona virus appearing in some parts of the world, there is no getting away from a very strict compliance with Covid appropriate behaviours, including masking, social distancing and hand sanitisation, in the foreseeable future.
This adds to the viability of work from home as a long-term corporate strategy.
A significant outcome of the Covid crisis is the adoption of some of these hybrid practices also by the government and the delineation they have caused — to the betterment of performance all round — between the decision takers or policy makers and the workforce that primarily implements those directions.
Ministries of Health, Infrastructure Development and Home got, in the process, their senior bureaucrats to handle governance at the micro levels too, to ensure execution of policies, which is a welcome development — even as the middle and lower segments of employees continue working under the appropriate hybrid mode.
In the Narendra Modi regime, this flowed from the top and that is why amid the unprecedented challenge of the pandemic, healthcare management, vaccination and economic revival could be met with promptness and efficacy.
Covid called for disaster management with the Centre being the national authority for handling it, and a valuable outcome of that has been a steady move forward towards cooperative federalism in spite of the historical legacy of political conflict developing between the Centre and the states on almost all policy issues.This is a precious gain that has to be preserved for the future.
(The writer is a former Director of Intelligence Bureau.The views expressed are personal)
pathak/arm
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