The pandemic has brought fore the need to digitalize the enterprise at a much faster pace. While in the past, Digitization was a choice, it is now a necessity. In the era of social distancing, virtual offices and working from homes, the productivity and business continuity needs to be ensured. The contagion has severely affected businesses across verticals, besides claiming the lives of a large number of people. With the government imposing stringent social distancing measures to break the chain of infection, most companies have adopted a work-from-home model to continue operations. Industry estimates suggest that as many as two-thirds of the 4.3 million ITBPO workforce in the country are working from home to offer uninterrupted services.
The biggest disadvantage of working from home, In India is over 60 % people face the problem of children or family demanding more attention from them while they work and many of them either end up working late or not being able to give their 100% attention to it. The second major factor that many people face while working from home is that they find it difficult to concentrate on work and constantly get distracted one way or the other. Nearly 33% of the people who work from home also do not have the necessary access to office equipment such as high-speed internet, fax/copier machine or a high-end laptop which also adds to their distress as they have a hard time replicating their work environment at home.
Secondly, productivity is less and one of the other major disadvantages of working from home is a loss in productivity as people tend to get distracted by comforts that they get at home. The most important thing while working from home is bringing discipline and time management every day. When a person only attends meetings all day, it is likely to drain the person out. You need to plan more and better when working from home.
Working from home is often subjected to distractions and it becomes difficult to set boundaries between personal and professional lives. A research shows that remote workers are more prone to data theft and other kinds of malware attacks. That’s because many employees prefer to use their personal laptops which typically don’t offer enterprise-grade security. While they connect their inadequately protected laptops to the enterprise network, those employees may be unknowingly enabling a cyber-security risk that can jeopardize the entire organization’s safety. Given this scenario, it’s crucial for companies to deploy the right firewall, endpoint verification, and VPN tunnels, thereby allowing employees to work on their own devices from home without the risk of third-party data breach incidents and ransomware attacks.
Flexible work arrangements, not only benefits the employee but the employer as well. Work-from-home if implemented strategically, can result in cost savings, productivity gains, and ultimately a more efficient workforce. The lack of robust technology infrastructure can disrupt not only individual performances but the overall business cycles as well. In most cases employees are grappling with getting the right hardware and software tools and myriad (me-ri-ad) technical issues which typically are handled by the IT department at offices. In that case, companies must streamline their applications at both the macro and micro levels to ensure that every employee has access to all the tools they need to meet their deliverables. This may include the distribution of laptops/computers to employees, providing broadband access and offering reimbursement for internet usage for office work.
