[mugen_pinaki27]

Originally Posted by HTC

WFH is the new normal for IT sector. It has its share of pros and cons. As many have said - either adopt or perish.
Not generalizing, but I always used to tell my friends that IT guys in india are living in a bubble. Insulated from all the hardship in society. Getting fat pay cheques. pampered by their MNC's with parties, outings, gifts, surprise bonus what not. Throughout the day, we are untouched by hardships. Travel by own vehicles, work in AC buildings, Frequently visit posh restaurants for expensive food ( read pizza, burgers and all that junk), spend lavishly on clothes and accessories etc. All this applies to me as well. Covid has given us time to mend our lifestyle and think about having a safety net.

I make it a point to travel by public bus once in a while to be in touch with reality. Watching women tired, standing in those jam packed buses after a day's hard work just to reach back home and again get into household chores makes me sad. At home after we stopped maid and cook due to covid fear, I took up the sweeping and mopping work. Let me tell you, it is NOT EASY. You will do happily for two weeks, after that its very difficult. Respect for our house maid has increased now. I made sure that our cook and maid get their salary for all the months as we asked them to stop coming. It's the least we can do.

Below are few simple lifestyle changes we have made to avoid unnecessary work,

• Each person in home gets one designated plate. They have to use it to have food, wash it after eating or before eating.

• Kept bare minimum utensils. If you want to make tea, wash the utensit and make your tea. simple.

• Set Breakfast. usually simple ones like bread omlet, poha etc.

• Afternoon - curd rice. every day.

• No breakfast without doing exercise.

• TV remote hidden till 3:30 p. You know why .

• Spend little time watering plants.

• Play minimum 10 mins badminton with kid in corridor. no worries as we are only 2 families left in our apartment corridor.

And few such small changes to make things easier on my wife and myself. I believe most of you have done the same at home, but thought of sharing it here.

Totally agree with you, Sir. COVID has brought forth a lot of harsh realities for me on the personal and professional front. But at the same time, made me realize that perseverance and patience are key to tackling any situation. Quite a sensible routine you've adopted.

[MadRasTan4986]

Originally Posted by HTC

Below are few simple lifestyle changes we have made to avoid unnecessary work,

• Each person in home gets one designated plate. They have to use it to have food, wash it after eating or before eating.

• Kept bare minimum utensils. If you want to make tea, wash the utensit and make your tea. simple.

• Set Breakfast. usually simple ones like bread omlet, poha etc.

• Afternoon - curd rice. every day.

• No breakfast without doing exercise.

• TV remote hidden till 3:30 p. You know why .

• Spend little time watering plants.

• Play minimum 10 mins badminton with kid in corridor. no worries as we are only 2 families left in our apartment corridor.

And few such small changes to make things easier on my wife and myself. I believe most of you have done the same at home, but thought of sharing it here.

An excellent routine sir. Thanks for sharing this.

[sridhu]

Folks

The challenge I am facing is with the chair. I currently use a 12 year old Staples Full Mesh (Seat & Back) chair. Now it is dying and needs to be replaced

Any recommendations?

Full Mesh & excellent back support a must.

I basically want a Herman Miller Aeron at around 45k!! Suggestions?

[NetfreakBombay]

Originally Posted by sridhu

Full Mesh & excellent back support a must.

I basically want a Herman Miller Aeron at around 45k!!...

Consider this : https://www.amazon.in/Featherlite-He...dp/B08PPBYL4W/

• Good lumbar support , full mesh back ; fabric seat
• Customizable for slide , tilt, armrest position / angle / slide
• Comfortable , costs ~23k

I had Aeron @ work. This feels as comfortable for WFH.

[rakesh_r]

WFH has been a blessing for me. Although I love driving but office commute is something that I always dread, especially now when the fuel prices have shot through the roof. While WFH, I can finally spend some time on reskilling, going for a walk or jog, catch a movie on OTT or spend some time in the kitchen with the wife.
Do I want to work from office once the situation gets normal, probably not, give me a good Internet and I am pretty much ok to work from anywhere.

[warrioraks]

At a very fundamental level, challenges in the WFH model are very similar to IT near-shore models. Anyone who has setup nearshore hubs would know the short term pain. These things are pursued only because top management sees financial merit in long term even though there are significant teething issues in the short term.
The same would apply for WFH in a post-Covid world. Organisations where management sees financial merits of WFH would promote it extensively and others who don’t will come back to square one eventually.

If I have to hazard a guess today - Post Covid working world will not be very different from the pre-Covid working world. Would like to revisit this post in 2025!

[aashishnb]

The one important impact to be considered - companies are not really saving costs due to WFH but transferring the costs (directly & indirectly) to employees. For e.g. the power cost for computer, AC, lighting, etc. is now borne by the employee; cost of consumables & your regular tea/coffee/water etc.

But most importantly, the fact that employees' will tend to be provided an ergonomic chair (to live up to the employer standards & reputation) in office and would most likely be working on his dining table, bed, sofa, study table, etc. at home leading to bad ergonomics and resultant problems. Even if one were to buy a proper chair, chances are it won't be an as fancy ergonomic one at office.

Even if you have a proper desk and chair, chances are you'll not have the same setup as office - for e.g. a lot of people with laptops have docking stations connected to large monitors, external full sized keyboards & mouse, etc. at office. At home, most of them will be working slouching into their laptop.

Originally Posted by NetfreakBombay

One solution is to have only "dumb" terminals @ home. Actual PC can be on-premise or cloud. With solutions like https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365 , data will not reach worker's home.

This would turn laptop / desktop in home into dumb terminal and only use of the device it to login to VPN and then actual desktop.

This way, employee cannot dump data/documents in USB and go to competitor (as an example).

Playing devil's advocate, this does not stop one from taking pictures of the screen or even a video.
With all the optical recognition softwares, etc. pictures can be converted to usable text based data.

[NetfreakBombay]

Originally Posted by aashishnb

The one important impact to be considered - companies are not really saving costs due to WFH but transferring the costs (directly & indirectly) to employees.

Industries where employees have leverage (such as Software dev for Products), norm is to allocate USD 4k per head to offset such issues. This covers ergonomics, UPS, WiFi etc.

In addition, a full IT Kit consisting of dual monitors , docking hubs is now the norm.

Even with that, there is net saving for companies. This is with usual model of IT Kit refreshes every 3 years.

Originally Posted by aashishnb

Playing devil's advocate, this does not stop one from taking pictures of the screen or even a video.
With all the optical recognition softwares, etc. pictures can be converted to usable text based data.

Yes, this wont stop leakage of small amount of data. However, one can't steal MBs of Code /Data with this approach.

[V.Narayan]

One of my children has joined Google in USA. Google has decided on a 3 on 2 off model between work from office and work from home team wise. The team as a whole has to be together in office on the same three days each week. How the co-ordination works I don't know but this is their permanent policy now. Given that by nature of its business every employee at Google works off a PC/laptop this can work. The aim is not so much to cut office space but to give employees flexibility. As most if not all Google employees in USA live in proper housing, and not 3 to a single room, I guess this will work.

As employers in India we see attrition on the rise during this extended WFH phase imposed since March 2020. It indicates both lack of cohesion, lack of human touch and a more mercenary approach amongst some employees. Some limited WFH will become common practice but I doubt outside small tech companies whether this will be the norm once the covid fear wanes.

[NetfreakBombay]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

One of my children has joined Google in USA. Google has decided on a 3 on 2 off model..

This seems to be the norm in tech, 4 - 10 days in office in a month for team meetings, WFH rest of the time. Most office are doing away with "allocated" desks to enable this.

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

As employers in India we see attrition on the rise during this extended WFH phase

This can cut both ways. Giving full-time WFH is a great lever due to competition for talent. This also does not impact team's PnL.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by NetfreakBombay

Giving full-time WFH is a great lever due to competition for talent.

Worked for me. (Not trying to say i'm any sort of great talent), but i'm going to be resigning from the company where i've spent the past 11 years to join a place that has a much more flexible remote work policy. Several other factors of course in the decision (and no, money is not one- am actually taking a pay cut to make the move), but the primary driver was to escape the terrible commute. My company is not showing any signs of even planning for a more flexible work strategy post covid. Can't go back to that again next year, especially now that i know for sure my work is not affected and my quality of life has improved over the past year and a half. Life is too short to spend 2 hours a day, five days a week, crawling in Bangalore traffic.

[vroom_vroom]

Originally Posted by sunilch

You guys are forgetting another important decision maker here. The HR Department. How else will you get the opportunity to celebrate 'Mehndi Party', Brown/Green/White/Jam Bag' Sessions, etc?

@sunilch. With all due respect, I think, you have a misconception about what HR does apart from organising these so called silly and time-wasting parties and sessions.

I am not in HR department and am myself a hardcore techie, but my wife is in HR and I see her slogging to keep up with her work. Sometimes I feel that she is more burdened that I am and believe me, I am not talking about the time she spends on organising these team events and sessions.

Secondly, these sessions are very important and we techies can never appreciate that. Especially in the current situation where team member have not seen their colleagues face-to-face in more than a year and hence, the team bonding in many cases is fading and people are becoming more and more robotic in nature.

Coming back to this topic, I myself has been in WFH mode even before this pandemic and believe me, I enjoy it. I get lot of free time to hone my other skills and hobbies apart from spending some quality time with the family. However, I used to visit my office (which is just a 10 mins. drive) couple of days a week just to meet others and socialise with them and I miss that part. I would like to continue working in that mode as I found to be perfectly balanced way of working, at least in my case.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by vroom_vroom

Especially in the current situation where team member have not seen their colleagues face-to-face in more than a year and hence, the team bonding in many cases is fading and people are becoming more and more robotic in nature.

I'd replace 'robotic' with 'professionally detached', but is that such a bad thing?

This is only my opinion/point of view- but as an IT worker in his early 40s, I'd like to be able to log in, do my job professionally, and log out. I'm not necessarily interested in bonding over lunch, antakshaari, or paintball. Yes, I have formed good relationships and even friendships that extended beyond my tenure at a particular organization but those were based on professional respect and shared job goals.

I've also seen my US counterparts, at several different organizations, all of whom work very effectively with their teams at a very high level of performance over years without ever having stepped into an office physically, or at most a couple of times a year.

I do realize this could be a limited view, I know I'm already older than the average age at a typical Indian IT company. And perhaps the relatively younger demographic here makes these sort of physical interactions necessary. (Though frankly, I never enjoyed these 'forced fun' activities even in my 20s and always avoided them!) But I think it's also possible to perform effectively without.

I completely agree about HR being SO much more than these things. Grateful for all the work that Human Resources personnel do to create a safe, comfortable, and enriching working environment for us!

[roy_libran]

Originally Posted by am1m

I'd like to be able to log in, do my job professionally, and log out. I'm not necessarily interested in bonding over lunch, antakshaari, or paintball. Yes, I have formed good relationships and even friendships that extended beyond my tenure at a particular organization but those were based on professional respect and shared job goals.

I am also of the same demographic and completely echo what you wrote here. Moreover in terms of continuing to bond with (some) colleagues, we tend to catch up over a Zoom call and discuss anything under the sun or poke fun at each other, just as we would have done in the breakout areas at work. It also allows us to break free from the diktats of Corporate Royalty to partake in (Veg - Yuck - No offense meant) team lunches or team outings (meh) .
As an upside Productivity is at an all time high and so is Morale. However the Royalty keep drumming up narratives on how people are missing the human interactions blah blah.

[AltoLXI]

Originally Posted by am1m

This is only my opinion/point of view- but as an IT worker in his early 40s, I'd like to be able to log in, do my job professionally, and log out. I'm not necessarily interested in bonding over lunch, antakshaari, or paintball.

+1 to that. The unwritten rule in corporate world is your colleagues are not your friends.

I will maintain good professional relationships with my colleagues but nothing more than that. Never believed the idea of bonding via all the stuff HR tries to do in the workplace. Maybe freshers just of college may appreciate these "fun" activities but certainly not for me.