Back To Work, At Home

India Inc has embraced remote working because of a health scare. But there are important lessons on enabling infrastructure, managing remote teams and ensuring productivity...

- Viveat Susan Pinto

Anubhav Srivastava, 38, an employee of Axis Bank in Mumbai, has never worked from home in his professional life. He now is. The coronavirus scare, which has forced businesses and ordinary citizens to limit interaction and maintain social distance, has meant that Srivastava, who manages corporate and institutional banking, now has to do everything he otherwise did in office, at home. “This is hardly easy,” he says. “I’m used to meeting people every day while I’m at office. I can’t do this at home. The second challenge is of handling varied tasks. There are people coming home, calls to take at the same time, paper work to wrap up, coordinating with colleagues and team members. I am slowly but steadily getting used to this,” he says.

Srivastava is just one among many in corporate India today who are grappling with a new normal — of working from home for a sustained period of time. While India’s growing millennial population has advocated the idea of work-life balance and remote engagement for years together, for many others, work-from-home is a largely untested idea.