An emotional chasm of long covid needs to be bridged

Where should employees work from? Office or home? In virtual meetings, should employees keep their cameras switched on? Answers to these questions that sprang up during the covid pandemic are critical to the very future of organizations.

- BIJU DOMINIC

There is a point of view that as long as the employees are completing the jobs assigned to them in time, it does not matter where they work from or whether their faces are visible at online meetings. Although there might be some small debates about the productivity of those working from home, the overall feeling is that most organizations that allow work-from-home have not reported any loss of productivity. But does the responsibility of an employee begin and end with the timely completion of assigned tasks? Or do the responsibilities of a corporate citizen go beyond?

The view that the organization-employee relationship is all about getting work done stems from the traditional belief that all human behaviour goes by a rational process. In this view, what can be measured—amount of work done, quality of the job, time taken to complete an assignment, etc—is all that matters. But new learnings about human behaviour, especially from brain studies, reiterate the fact human behaviour is mostly an emotional activity, work included. The employee’s job satisfaction level, degree of trust in the organization and comfort with its culture all matter a lot. So, contributing to emotional facets of work is an employee responsibility that is at least as important as completing tasks in time, if not more.