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![]() | #766 | ||||
Distinguished - BHPian ![]() Join Date: May 2010 Location: Bangalore
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
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Again, not to dispute the logic of above business decision, it is certainly valid. Not all firms can/will invest in such systems. Quote:
Personally, I welcome that. But I am at a different stage in my career. Younger employees might certainly want to consider those implications. But on the other hand, I see several younger people already comfortable with the idea of gig work. So we need to see how it all pans out. Quote:
![]() Last edited by am1m : 26th October 2023 at 17:44. | ||||
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![]() | #767 |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many?
Hello, here's the point of view of someone who's been working remotely since 6 years. Your attitude towards your employees, and your maids, seems very harsh and insulting to me. It looks like what you're saying is that the employee doesn't matter, they should, and will, do whatever the shareholder/customer tells them to do. I think if you keep treating your employees like kids, they will keep behaving like kids, if you keep trying to micromanage them, it shouldn't be a surprise when they waste their time when not being micromanaged. When you never allow your employees to be adults, it's obvious you can't trust them to work productively from home. This may be part of the Indian work culture and mentality, but my past few years of working with European companies has been a very different experience. There is a clear recognition in the European work culture that the purpose of a job is to get some money that you can use to enjoy other more important things in life, and so the value given to an employee is far higher than that to a customer. My purpose in life is not just to increase the profits of my employers, and when all the employees of an organization agree with that sentiment, it creates a very different work environment. We work hard not because the boss is standing over our shoulder, we work hard because we are adults, adults who take pride in the work that we do, adults who enjoy the process of solving problems, adults who take satisfaction in being useful and productive. Are there people around us who misuse this privilege and freedom? Of course there are, but when you foster a work culture based on trust and responsibility, such people quickly get thrown out, not because the boss spots them being lazy, but because their colleagues who work diligently and conscientiously never allow their work standards to go down just because of one bad apple. To be clear, I'm not saying that Work from Home is correct is every situation for every company. What I am saying is that the advantages that remote work brings in the sense of time spent with family, rent savings, comfort of not having to commute to office, hot meals at home, ability to work from the mountains or the beach etc. have to be carefully weighed against the negatives of security risks etc. My perspective is that if a job can be done from home with reasonable efficiency, the employee at least should have the option to do so. At the minimum, vague gesturing at the shareholder/customer/economics is not a sufficient reason against work from home. Any company of course has the choice to force return to office, but the risk that entails is losing all the adults, who would rather take remote jobs and continue life on the beach. If you're the shareholder it's your job to explain to the customer why this employee working from home is better for all 3, and it's also your job to realize that the employee is a human being, not a gear in a machine. |
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![]() | #768 | |
BHPian ![]() Join Date: Jun 2023 Location: Bangalore
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
On the 2nd point, which demography do you think is better off with WFO ? Non well off female employees? Because some people can't work at home, that's why everyone has to go to office? | |
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![]() | #769 |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? I've often seen opinions like these emerge from companies and managers with a very limited worldview. I think it's undeniable that a lot (not everyone) of people in SE Asia like to stay till late at work because they don't like going back to their "nagging" family or be responsible for young children. Which is why such people compel others in their office to also work in person. Forget working from home, I have seen people prioritize work over being admitted in the hospital because such is the work culture in those companies. I don't really care if in the old days 6 days working week used to be the norm because in the even older days, people used to ride bullock carts to go farm or hunt animals. We also used to scribble on walls. We don't really do that anymore do we? We have machines and technology to make us more productive and we have other avenues of life to enjoy besides going to work everyday of the week. So I choose to prioritize time with my family over making a bunch of boomers happy. I've been part of many large enterprise organizations which only consider the impact an employee makes and really do not consider it any of their business where the employee works from. It's not their business to ensure that the employee is able to socialize and bump into somebody in the foyer, because they believe that is the employee's prerogative to manage in their own personal time and that the office workspace is not supposed to be used as a vehicle to improve one's social life. I work from home, I do my own chores, I have no maids, i love spending time with my family , I like staying with them, I'm still impactful at my work and I've got my share of promotions to show for it. This is the same case with other high performing and responsible employees in my team and organization who don't have to be micromanaged to perform at their best. We have the confidence and the skills needed to survive anywhere if we were to lose our jobs in one place. Even being on the board of 59 different companies doesn't give anybody the right to tell me how good I can be at doing my job. Thank you and no offence intended. Last edited by 4Runner : 26th October 2023 at 19:01. |
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![]() | #770 | |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
And quite often, that bad apples are not thrown out - they sort of pull down the overall motivation of the group and rot the culture. If we have the self-regulating kind of environments in large organizations where responsible employees thrive and bad apples are thrown out, we wouldn't have this thread in the first place. All organizations would be fully working from home (where possible), thereby saving a lot of costs. It is not just the rentals that can be saved. The wage bill would be reduced significantly since hiring an engineer in Hubli would cost less than hiring in Bengaluru. As someone said before - if you see every vehicle coming in the wrong way, might be that you are the one going wrong. Similarly, if multiple organizations are facing a common problem, it's unlikely that all of them are wrong in the same way at the same time. | |
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![]() | #771 |
Senior - BHPian ![]() | Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? I am enjoying the respectful exchange of differing opinions here. Let's keep it going! COVID has indeed brought about a massive change in behavior for employees as well as employers. At the beginning, employers were more than willing to make it as easy as possible for employees to continue to work. They even shipped monitors and arranged discounts on home office furniture! Employees loved the flexibility and employers loved the continued operations. Now, employees have gotten used to the work life balance, the extra time they get to spend with their loved ones and enjoy not having to waste time commuting. Employers on the other hand seem to be getting jittery about empty offices and the lack of networking effect. To me, the biggest disadvantage of working from home is the lack of hallway interactions, the casual conversations that lead to different ideas and collaborations. Perhaps the best solution is a balance of the two extremes. Full time work from home across the board is not going to be a reality. But WFO needs to bring in flexibility that was not there prior to COVID. What that balance is, that is for each company to explore on its own. There probably is no pre-canned solution here. All of this is also in the backdrop of how tight the labor market is. At least in the US, there is a huge shift from last year and the pendulum has swung in the favor of employers. So, employees need to accept that reality too. |
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![]() | #772 |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Found this interesting piece of news. Narayana Murthy Suggests 70-Hour Work Week To Youngsters, Sparks Debate In context of current thread, just wondering if hours of commute time will be included in "70 hours" or not? ![]() On a serious note, even if you give historical context of WW2, expecting employees to give so much of time is absurd IMHO. That too when the salaries of freshers (as Mr Murthy is quoting specifically "Youngster") for companies like Infy/TCS has hardly increased in last decade. So basically employees should give much more of their time without any expectation of enhanced compensation and that too from Office. ![]() |
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![]() | #773 | ||
Distinguished - BHPian ![]() | Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
Yes, in the end, it is about customers and economics (company financials), there is no doubt about it. I have found that having highly motivated, loyal and competent employees makes it a lot easier to meet my customer demands and my financial targets. So I spend a lot of my time and energy understanding what my employees like, need and want and how I can support and grow them. I can tell you, that every person that I ever met, wherever in the world, likes to have more control over their work, when they do it, how they do and so. They prefer an emphatic manager who helps them grow, rather than one who checks up on them. Do employees need to learn those traits as you suggested? I am sure many do, but to me, that is a huge part of being a manager. You are not responsible for the employees that are in the department you take over. But you are responsible for how you develop every one of them. How many companies have systems and policies in place that hold managers accountable for growing their employees in these different aspects, other than their field of expertise? (which is the easy one). I do believe, to your point, there is not a one-size-fits-all WFH or WFO model as such. In practice, you will very often see some kind of hybrid model if you like. So people will work at the office and home in many cases. I have seen many companies making the same mistake during the COVID years. They were forced to go WFH, and made a few changes, but did not fundamentally change their ways of working. That is a recipe for disaster. And it shows. A lot of the negative comments concerning WFH simply show a lack of adaption and finding new ways of working to overcome those. Again, that is just poor management. People need to stop moaning about not meeting at the coffee machine. Find a different way to meet and bump into people. Although some of my experience is in Telecom and IT, my comments are more related to WFH in general and certainly not restricted to the IT industry or India as such. All my kids, my son-in-law and my daughter-in-law work in very different industries than IT and Telecom. None of them work full time, none of them WFO full time. I just came across this article on enterpeneur.com: https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing...tations/463696 A couple of interesting quotes: Quote:
To add to the symbiotic relationship between wellbeing and productivity; the same has been proven true for due care for the environment (ESG) and productivity. Jeroen Jeroen | ||
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![]() | #774 | |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
The work attitude was entirely task oriented, not results driven. Any issue would result in the team throwing up their hands and waiting for direction from the US counterparts, rather than trying to fix it themselves. It was highly frustrating, to say the least. It took new management wielding a big stick to turn things around. | |
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![]() | #775 |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many?
I would agree with this somewhat, but I would say it's sort of a chicken and egg situation. When I worked for an Indian IT company back in 2010, I was picked up straight from college. The college treated us all like kids to begin with, no real critical thinking skills were taught, just fall in line and follow the crowd. I was sent to Chennai for training, and that was even worse than college! Far more importance was given to the color of my shoes than building my skills. Then I got a project in Mumbai, and my team leader and project manager were the first people who treated me like someone with half a brain, but I was extremely lucky in that, and that's where my attitude changed. If they had treated me the way my trainers at Chennai did, my formative experience in IT would have been extremely negative, and I can't imagine what my thought process would have been subsequently. Maturity doesn't spawn out of nothing, it flows from and is nurtured by your environment. The Indian work culture is an expert in killing maturity, and then complaining about why the workers behave like kids. |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? I work from home and provide services to clients as a contractor. In my family and friends circle, a number of them have been working from home even before COVID. But most, if not all of them are based out of US. One of my cousins was at a senior position in IBM, and he had no office. He was either travelling or would work from home. I envied him, but whenever we were on this topic, I always felt such a concept can't succeed at a large organised scale in India. Difficult to put it in words, but to make my point I often draw a corollary from self driving cars. Compared to how it is in countries where this concept originated, we treat self driving cars as trash and abuse them. I feel something similar will happen or happens with WFH. Probably we don't prove to be good custodians of something entrusted to us in good faith. |
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![]() | #777 | |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
All, Eventually each employer in the service sector will evolve to some variant of WFH-WFO balance. Those employees who wish to only work from home will eventually find themselves a part of the gig economy - contract consultants paid on output and without assurance of income an employment brings. That will work for many and good for them. The tone on this thread by some that they wish to be employees {assured income, social security cover, paid more for time rather than measurable output} but still be 100% or substantially WFH is less likely to happen at least in India. If the world economy takes a tumble or if the world witnesses a boom both will have ramifications for the WFH-WFO scenario depending on which sides bargaining clout increases or decreases. Unfortunately, as I said in post nos # 762 this debate at least on this thread has become like religion with inflamed opinions and even a neutral statement or explanation or sharing of views angers some members a little too much! Further there is a misconception that WFH-WFO is an existential matter - it isn't - certainly for the employer it isn't in India at least. And neither the employer nor the employee can have their cake and eat it too. Customers in USA/Europe tolerated having their systems accessed by IT/BPO employees in India from home due to the global emergency. Far too many of them, as I see it, are reluctant to continue doing that. Hence my oft repeated statement that the customer takes the call finally. Some posts on this thread have a strong I, me, myself flavour with little appreciation that the customer who pays the bills ultimately decides if he is okay with WFH and to what extent. And the primary factor for the customer is cyber security. I know from personal association at least 5 large IT/BPO/Internet Services companies that have permitted those who insist on 100% WFH to become a contract consultant with an IT security cage within which they can access the company's cyber systems - not all jobs fit in that. If your job cannot be done within an IT cage and you demand 100% WFH then parting of ways is the answer. This at least is what I am observing with a workforce of about 150,000 within these 5 organizations. I don't wish to be rude to any one who is an employee somewhere. In any situation of bargaining or negotiating it helps to be very conscious of one's balance of negotiating power. Till unemployment in India remains what it is the employer (in any sector) wields the lathi. Ranting on social media won't change that. I am trying to share the employers perspective so that it is of some use to members here given that most of this thread, which I started, has degenerated into an angry echo chamber. | |
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![]() | #778 |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Guys, we need to listen to sensible facts that people on both sides are putting down. Unfortunately they are getting lost in the rhetoric and memes, either of the 'Indian employee and his poor work ethic' or 'inept management' variety. Both are true in specific, anecdotal cases but both are lazy generalizations. Personally, I've found so much useful information from members like V.Narayan who just has a level of insight that I don't possess, and I've learnt so much from his posts. Admittedly I've also been triggered by generalizations in other posts that don't agree with my viewpoint and have reacted to them, often just repeating the same things I've already posted earlier. That doesn't contribute anything to the discussion. (But immensely satisfying though and, I guess, doesn't hurt TBhp page views either! ![]() Ultimately what is coming out is that both models can work in the IT industry (including the vague 'hybrid' ![]() Perhaps this thread could now evolve into one where we share strategies, personal experiences to help people make the transition. Or advice on why it may not be the best solution for a specific individual/business. Without either being interpreted as a refuting of one's worldview. Last edited by am1m : 27th October 2023 at 09:39. |
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many?
I am doubtful on the customer part though. My customer shutdown and vacated the office space during COVID and offered permanent WFH for their employees and direct contractors. For business operations they opened a new space and that was meant only for business, not IT. They offered the same privileges to be extended to their vendors also. But when this came up, the company's response was that the clients(customer) should not interfere in the company operations and we were warned of HR actions for discussing internal things with customer ![]() Quote:
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Again +1. I wonder what is preventing companies from throwing out such people. Couple of personal experiences. My customer has an ongoing project done by a WITCH company. This company build a team and 3 people in the team refused to work for no reason. They were still in the team and billable, but they just wont work. Seeing this other people also started following the same footsteps. A senior guy there told me that this attitude is because they know the company is not going to take action on them, worst case they will be moved out of the project. Few years back we took a 5yr exp resource in our team. He worked on a similar technology as ours and the idea was to train him and get the work done. But then he seemed to be missing the big picture, so we started on the basics. We asked this guy to write a java program to add 2 numbers and he simply couldn't, even using Google's help ![]() | ||
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![]() | #780 | ||
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| Re: Work From Home (WFH): Is this the future for many? Quote:
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