Let’s talk WFH, the new ‘Work from Home’ concept that has gripped corporates in India and the rest of the world, as businesses progressively embrace this new, forced phenomenon in a world crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic and its inscrutable death-grip on companies and economies. Here again, there have been two distinct huddles in industry sectors worldwide — the corporate haves and the have-nots. The ‘haves’ include sectors such as information technology and IT-enabled Services (ITeS), creative writers and journalists, communications agencies and bloggers, etc. They can function, albeit on crutches and at a slower pace. For the ‘have-nots’, the battle is going to be long and gory, for airlines, the hospitality sector, travel and tourism, real estate, automobile manufacturing and ancillaries, and so on. For them, the writing is on the wall. There will be no quick-fix or succour available for a long time.
Companies, while letting go, are getting their own back as well. As stated, desperate times call for desperate measures. ‘Quartz’ recently reported that some Indian IT companies have implemented employee productivity trackers like webcam-based movement capture, hourly time-sheet entry and of keyboards to ensure that employees at home are, indeed, working. Yugal Joshi, vice-president at Texas-based consultancy Everest Group, was quoted by Quartz: “This indicates a deep-rooted malaise in Indian IT & ITeS industry where the senior management generally mistrusts people,” he added.
