COVID-19 impact: OYO moves summer internships online; others may follow suit

Ranjini Roy, an MBA student, was looking forward to her summer internship at a private bank in India. But, with the coronavirus outbreak, it looks like her internship will be done from home.

“While it is good that I am at least able to complete my internship, it won’t be the same as a physical office. My institute has told me that the bank will be taking a decision by May 16,” she added.

COVID-19 has forced India Inc into a lockdown with all business processes being managed from home. With this, special projects including summer internships have also moved online.

Among companies, OYO Hotels & Homes is among the first to begin the internship process online. In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Dinesh Ramamurthi, Chief Human Resources Officer - OYO Hotels & Homes, has said that the firm has more than 200 interns joining this summer.

Also read: Live updates from Coronavirus pandemic in India

“The first batch of 50 plus interns joined us on April 2, 2020. The interns are divided into different batches and are being offered the flexibility of joining us based on their respective curriculums and classes. The duration of the internship varies from four weeks, six weeks, and eight weeks based on the requirements of the different institutes,” he added.

Summer internships for college students are essentially a first step into the corporate world and an opportunity to learn how a professional workplace functions. While companies are trying to use the online medium to deliver a similar experience considering the pandemic, students will lose out on being physically present in an office setting.

OYO is hosting interns from management colleges such as IIM Bangalore, IIM Calcutta, MDI Gurgaon, TISS - HRM & LR and XLRI Jamshedpur among others.

How will it work?

Ramamurthi said that the company is using internal communications channels, Slack and virtual video conferencing tools as well as email and phones to interact with the interns.

“We are organising sessions with the senior leadership team and functional leaders depending on the teams that OYO interns are working with. Currently, we have interns learning about different aspects of OYO’s business across functions such as conversion, finance, revenue management, operations, supply, sales, HR and transformation, among others. The interns will be working on live projects which have a business impact to ensure that they get meaningful work experience,” he added.

OYO has also assigned group projects to the interns to promote team building. Further, discussions also happen between interns and the project mentors. Here, the teams discuss daily updates, agenda for the day and proactively define their work cut out for the day.

Summer internships also involve students solving live case studies for the companies they work in. These cases involve student innovative solutions through their research on current or future challenges at the workplace. Based on the summer internship performance, some companies also give out pre-placement offers (PPOs) to these students.

PPOs mean that a student does not have to sit for interviews during the final placements that begin from January onwards. The company they interned with offers them a permanent position if the team is satisfied with the work done by the candidate.

Ramamurthi said that, for assessment at OYO, the company has divided the review process into two parts - mid-review presentation and final review presentation. Here, the intern will present to the project mentor and functional head details of their project and learnings.

He added that the purpose of the mid-review presentation is to correct the course and provide feedback for the remaining duration of the internship.

What is the way forward?

Both institutes and corporates that Moneycontrol spoke to, said that online internships will be the way forward in 2020.

“The course curriculum is treated as incomplete if a student does not complete a summer internship. Rather than the process being cancelled, online internships are better,” said an IIM student placement coordinator.

However, companies said that not all students may have the necessary infrastructure at home to complete internships and hence only select candidates could be chosen for this.

The HR head at a mid-sized bank told Moneycontrol that they would be deferring the internships to June end rather than offer it online.

“We would find it tough to assess students if they are working from home. Because they are not full-time employees whose past track record we have an idea of,” he added.

Similarly, the vice president at an appliance firm explained that the company has decided to slash the internships by 10 percent to 80 so that students in green and orange zones can travel to the offices thrice a week.

Once the lockdown is completely lifted, students would get an opportunity to visit the offices. Ramamurthi of OYO also said that the company would ‘love’ to host interns in the offices post lockdown but only if it is absolutely safe.

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