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-   -   Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/221831-work-home-wfh-future-many-51.html)

Warning: Employer's point of view ahead.

It is amazing and amusing how many employees believe that real estate lobbies and caterers, taxi operators etc play a part in determining WFH vs WFO. If one read the last few pages of this thread one may come away with the impression that the organization is being run for the employees and there is no entity called the customer or the risk taker (i.e. shareholder/entrepreneur) in the picture.

Sorry to disappoint readers but in position one the most important person in the game is the customer, followed in second place by the risktaker-entrepreneur-shareholder, in third place comes the Government, followed in fourth position by all the factors of production i.e. employees, machinery, real estate, vendor suppliers et al. A business is not run for the employees anymore than my household is run for our two maids.

Most IT companies would like their employees to be treated fairly and reasonably but to believe that WFH is to be the norm because employees feel that way is to be naïve.

The degree of WFH that will settle in as a stable diet will vary from organization to organization and from customer to customer and both across time. Some employees, many on this thread for sure, believe that (a) WFH is their right – oops sorry folks it is an option in some circumstances that will be determined by the forgotten entity the customer and then by the employer; (b) WFH enhances productivity and quality. That is the view of some of the employees – mainly the well off male employee with adequate space in his house to set up a work place and some one to take care of household chores – aka almost all on Team BHP!

With times work mores change. India was almost universally on a 6-day week when I started my career 4+ decades ago. Today it is a 5-day week in the organized sector at least. Similarly some degree of WFH is now accepted. And within limits can be made to work. For every diligent, industrious, and ethical Team BHPian there are rougue employees who misuse WFH in a dozen ways to the detriment of the customer and employer. Some here claim that WFH is more productive – for whom I ask – the employee or the customer or the employer. Most employees would love to work with little or no supervision or answerability but the paying customer does not see it that way. Serving on the Boards of 3 IT services/Internet services companies of size I do not see WFH as more productive. It works within limits. And within those limits that work for employee-employer-customer it is here to stay to.

While the sector of real estate did make some mumbling sounds a few months back about WFO they too realized quickly that for the IT business they were in the fourth bucket of priority {see para #2 above}.

Amazon has enabled managers to take strict action, including termination, against employees who don't adhere to the 3-day WFO rules. As per the news report, they have rolled out a protocol for dealing with recalcitrant employees.

IT is an industry in which everyone works at their own pace. You cannot precisely measure the quality or quantity of work accomplished by an individual. For instance, it may be as little as 200 lines of code that need to be written in a project estimated to last one month. However, an expert developer could potentially complete this task in a single day.

In this industry, I've observed that work is often quantified by the amount of time spent rather than the actual complexity of the tasks involved. It means a simple task by an inefficient person may bill company more hours while a complex tax estimated and done by an expert may earn company less. It can be challenging for management to gauge increases in productivity unless it is also reflected in the hours billed, especially from an IT services perspective.

Now, consider a scenario where IT employees are compensated per unit of work completed, akin to how Uber drivers are paid. In such a situation, the responsibility falls on the employees to choose the most productive mode of working.

I am confident that the majority would opt for remote work (WFH) or co-working spaces in their favorite destinations, such as Goa, Himalayas. This would directly address the dilemma, instead of arguing with point of views from employees and employers.

I am sure, cities like Bangalore are just not places for anyone to be productive.

A customer, shareholder or a manager worth his dime cares much for overall output then individual output. If things were so simple, there would be no need for large organizations and everyone could be an individual contractor.

In my opinion, WFH majorly hampers the development of freshers in the large IT services companies. Most of the freshers are from Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges and need constant guidance during the initial few months on a live project. Sitting together, with the ease of just walking over and talking to seniors can never be replaced by a Teams call. We have generally seen the sedate freshers missing out in the WFH scenario. Development has been slow and a lot of freshers have been let go due to performance issues. On the other hand, an enforced WFO of 3 days a week has helped a lot in developing skills faster and ensuring that they can meet the demands of a live project.

The large IT organizations depend a lot on the correct pyramid for their profitability and if freshers are to develop, then it is imperative that the senior also come to office to guide and handhold them.

This, of course, is probably just a part of the reason, but one that I have encountered first hand in the last few years.

The organizations are asking employees to return to office and threatening of consequences if failing to do so. I think that's quite fair because that's what most of us signed up for initially.

What is not fair though is the expectations of some organizations to not just go back to the pre pandemic norm of working from office, but also expecting employees to be be seamlessly available round the clock as was the case during the pandemic.

Before pandemic many people in large IT companies worked from desktops and once they left office there was no more office back at home or in transit, save for an odd call over the phone. Collaborative tools such as Teams or others were not that mainstream before pandemic and it was not easy to connect to everyone from home.

Pandemic changed that, even for IT giants who believe in providing a laptop a luxury to associate. It became a compulsion for them.

I know what I am talking here is about an organizational culture but I think pandemic has left its after effects on work culture where one is always connected always available. Organizations must look at this as well while going back to olden days.

Yes, that would ideally be where IT will evolve to.

Large teams in large organizations survive because of the 10-20% of people who actually solve problems.

They do the work for the remaining 80% in their office. In addition, they also engage in moonlighting, too, lol.

If you work in IT, I think you can actually understand what I am talking about.

There are many newly established small service companies across India that are operating in a pure work-from-home mode and have not yet considered moving to a work-from-office (WFO) mode. I am personally aware of at least 2 such organizations that were started by my friends.

I feel such way of working is where future of IT services lies. Large organizations will fail, if they fail to identify and adapt to this low-cost , more efficient mode.

I have said so before and I say it again. Most companies that are demanding their staff to return to office have a managerial problem. Nothing else. The problem is rarely the employee, it is old fashioned managers who don’t know how to deal and manage staff remotely. It is also about managers micromanaging their staff and having way to much detailed knowledge about the content of the work their staff performs. These managers are not letting go of their content expertise.

I have found this to be very prevalent in Indian IT and Telecom industry. Even at a C level the amount of detailed discussion was staggering! The level of detail in for instance progress reporting would be mind boggling. In my forty years of working in top level positions all over the world, I have never come across this sort of obsessive detail managing. I mean, why do you employ all these experts and folks if you still want to be able to follow and know every detail.

So for me, companies that are rigid in their approach to WFH have a poor management structure, poor out of date management and probably don’t have the appropriate process and or reward systems in place.

These folks fall in the typical trap of only being able to recognise what they have lost (can’t see what my staff is doing minute by minute) and simply keep their minds closed for all the additional benefits. Which are plenty.

Of course, at the end of the day the labour market is also about supply and demand. Here in the west almost every industry is having a very hard time recruiting staff. If you don’t offer a decent WFH policy you will be at a serious disadvantage. How’s that for productivity? Without having sufficient staff there is no productivity at all.

There is also a much larger issue at stake here. All this WFO creates massive peak hour jams and congestions on the roads and similar on public transport. We know from the couple of years of COVID restrictions what positive effect the WFH had on these problems and the improvement on air quality in town and major cities. Any company claiming to be working towards a better more sustainable world simply can not have a decent WFH policy! It’s make the world a better place, start at your own home (company) first.

Obviously, there are regional, cultural whatever differences in all of the above. I am absolutely convinced that allowing and fascilitating staff to work from home is the way forward. For many reasons, for both the employer and the employees. Unfortunately, there are still lots of companies, all over the world, who lack the basic managerial skills to manage such a big change, because it is a BIG change. Make no mistake. But that is what managers should be doing, ensuring these changes happen. Which mean changing everything, from HR policies, to work processes etc.

In fact, you will probably need to get rid of a lot of your current managers, because they simply lack the skills and empathy required. Which might be good news, get rid of the dead wood!

Yes, there might be customers who put demands on companies and where the employees reside. I have rarely found any situations where we could not come to a suitable arrangements. Customers will always ask what they believe is the easiest and cheapest for them. Certainly in India that means you like to fence in as many Fte’s as you possibly can. Your own and your vendor. But when we showed them our way of working and how quickly we could make competence available through other means than just being in their or our local office, it was rarely a problem.

Of course, there are plenty of jobs for which WFH is simply not an option. There are a few office jobs where for various jobs it might be necessary to be at an office. But the vast majority of office jobs and a bunch of other jobs can be done remotely.

Jeroen

Hello Sir, first of all let me start with first principles:


Now adding a few more points

• Work gets done at office more faster, not because we're productive at office, but because of the personal rapport that starts primarily at the watercooler & vending machines
• Just like most business deals are done over a golf course & breakfast, most work gets done over coffee & "sutta"
• Indians poor communication skills when added to working in isolation {at home} gets even worse
• The home environment for most of us, is 100% not conducive enough {barring a very very few} in our noisy nation
• The office environment changes the entire psychology of even the laziest mind to putforth some initiative due to peer influence
• For most family members, WFH terminology is Work FOR Home

The reason why the rocket science meme is relevant is because the entire business is based on billing, prevent a problem and the team will be downsized, solve an issue that escalated because of festering issues - appreciations galore and more responsibilities.

The water cooler is simply not a place where employees hang around, post pandemic, everyone gets their own water bottles. The personal rapport is not there, this is specific to IT services, you may have a social circle, that's entirely up to your networking skills.

The daily grind, BAU as we call it, is nothing like a business deal, smoking is banned and coffee breaks are for when work load is low. Login in, open teams and update, send an email when a wide audience is required. This is also necessary is your working beyond regular hours, an appreciative response sets the stage for further growth.

Poor communication is basically a side effect of poor management, the tech team will not be drafting mails when fixing an issue. The manager should take the initiative and update on what is going on, owning the issue removes a lot of the frustration. The clients are well versed with the tech jargon, bad English isn't a deal breaker, it isn't literature, just a summary and a few misplaced articles in the text isn't a disaster.

The wfh crowd has the facilities, it's not for everyone and never has been, even in office, there's plenty of distraction.

The office environment is great for some, the majority make it a point to let everyone know their boundaries, usually no extended hours, no parties and definitely no ethnic day.

WFH means you're not available for any household chores, if your family can't understand, office everyday it is.

Sorry sir, that might be a bit of an assumption. In fact there are several female colleagues who are leveraging remote work to more effectively juggle the various demands on their time. And I believe there were reports of TCS seeing a higher degree of women employee attrition after the recall to office.

Is there some data to show that the majority of employees are misusing remote work? Or that there has been a productivity drop overall? Till then, I think both/either sides will present perception as fact.

Absolutely stellar to hear this from someone with such a long history as an employer and senior manager across multiple countries!

Wow, I now realize how lucky I've been in my 2-decade old career in IT that I never had to work under a single manager that had such a 'high' opinion of their Indian employees' worth ethic. Most of my managers trusted me to just get the job done without having to light anything under anywhere.

I guess as a manager, one gets what one expects, or probably one expects the same behavior that one displayed as an employee.

Within the IT community who are a small segment of Indian industry as a whole WFH or no WFH has become like a religion or a passionately held political belief where God fights on our side and the other side is incompetent or lazy, backward or woke, lacks management skill or is a shirker etc. And proponents of either side are determined to convert the other!

Fact is WFH will work for some organizations and some customers; and within them for some periods of time and for a few all the time. Equally there will be others for whom it may not work at all. What will emerge will be an amalgam of these. While awareness of the horrid rigid backward employer needing to change is obvious on this thread. What hasn't been touched upon is that fact that the average employee will also have to learn to be self-supervised, self-disciplined to the degree needed to get the job done. Right now this thread assumes that the WFH employee is all set to be a great WFH employee and the backwardness lies with the employer. This sadly is not my experience repeated several times over. I have quoted data in earlier posts of employees we have had to remove for fraud, double dipping, sharing customer data, security breeches etc during the covid19 times.

Gradually there will be employers, usually smaller companies who accept part or full time WFH. There will be others who will accept only a one day of WFH in a week or none at all. And there will be employees willing to work for both kinds of employers. The lines will blurr between a full time WFH employee and a contract consultant and at some point it will reflect in the economics.

Representing the employer on this thread I don't buy the strong hints by some that WFH is a superior system keeping in mind all stakeholders and not just the employee; or that those who require WFO are backward or out of date. That is a rather childish perspective. Ultimately the customer and economics drives everything.

This thread keeps veering off to the IMHO narrow view that lousy managers and Vice Presidents are pushing the WFO agenda for their daily power dose. In the end it is the customer who influences what he wants and how.

And just to put things in perspective we are talking here of 5.4 million in the IT sector out of ~147 million workers in the service sector alone in India.

Just asking to understand better, not to challenge your experience or data - these things never happened before covid-19 remote work? Or such incidents were fewer? Or such incidents are impossible except in a remote work setup? As a non-executive employee, I don't have any insight into these things.

100% I think if we all accept this fact, this thread will stop becoming a 'this vs. that'.

Amongst the companies I am associated with the frequency of malafide incidents created by employees working from home increased 2X to 4X during the covid19 period varying with location and time. The biggest problem of all was the significantly increased vulnerability of the company's computer systems to viruses due to every machine operating via a home line. There is only so much you can do to protect a disbursed network. The customers suffered it because during the pandemic there was little choice. This last point is not the fault of the employee but it was a reality of the WFH system.

All three organizations I'm associated with have let go of some office space and moved to some variant of hybrid working. What kind of hybrid working varies by location, grade, department, project etc. Today team work can be tight with WFH as most still know each other in the real world. It is to be seen how integration takes place when everybody only knows the other virtually. If some degree of WFH made life easier for working mothers & young parents and reduced the burden of commutes I'm all for it. Those who wish to pursue only WFH will I guess soon, in a year or two, find themselves as skilled contract workers. Companies will (and are) thinking of why they need the legal & financial load of an employee when they could get by with a contract consultant - less cost less HR related liabilities.

As networks get more secure some form of hybrid working will creep into other service industries too. Some such as hospitality, transport and healthcare it may never touch. It is really not as big a deal as the journalists make it out to be or as it may seem reading this thread.

If you may kindly permit me, would like to share an incident that could perhaps make you smile, but something to think about as well.

Mid of 2009, we were in a certain IT services division that was newly acquired & hence the team was growing with a good mix of experienced folks anywhere from 4 to 15 years. Since we were all in the formation, we had plenty of budget, lot of things to explore & a great individual freedom at work since the management was figuring out what more services can be done from offshore. Our director, who was nearing the sunset of his career used to stop at most cubicle as he entered the office every morning for a short chitchat both in getting to know people & what they're doing at work.

So on a certain day, he stopped at a certain cubicle & was casually chatting with a colleague of ours & here's how the conversation went

Dir: So, how're you, how's life
Col: All good
Dir: How's work?
Col: Not much going on, just awaiting for xyz project
Dir: Good; not sure I saw you yesterday, were you in office yesterday?
Col: Since there's no work, I was working from home yesterday
:deadhorse

That evening all managers had an inbox communication stating their privileges to approve WFH no longer exist. Any WFH approval has to go through the directory only including the respective managers.