MC ExpertEye: By when will employees return to office?

Note to Readers: MC ExpertEye is a weekly series of articles that will dive deeply into an important topic by seeking answers from experts.  

While work from home (WFH) has definitely given corporate executives respite from long commute, extended working hours have turned out to be a bummer. For most, getting the ‘me time’ is a challenge due to the hectic log-in hours and the pressure to deliver more while working remotely.

We asked a bunch of entrepreneurs when they see things normalising and employees coming back to the offices. Take a look at what they have to say.

Kabir Jeet Singh, chief executive officer and co-founder of QSR-chain, Burger Singh: Our employees have already resumed inter-city travel and face-to-face meetings starting August 15 as things started opening up.  However, COVID has taught us that we don't really need an office to get things done. So till April 1, we will strictly continue a work-from-home policy. After which, we will start a pilot for a permanent flexible work environment. In that, we have three work style options for employees.

One will be traditional work from an office model. Second would be a hybrid model where they work from home, but come to the office at least two days a week. And third would be allowing employees to work from anywhere for a short term, say six to eight months. Here the employee can work from any city - this option is for people who want to spend time with the parents in the home town. Someone wants to be in the hills or by the beach. Or for new parents, of course, this will all depend on the work profile of the individual and how long they are needed on the ground; we trust the employees to get the job done. We have a culture of taking responsibility and seeing it through. We don't feel the need to monitor every minute of the employee. And this way, I think we will be able to attract the best talent and retain them.

Smiti Bhatt Deorah, co-founder and chief operating officer at Advantage Club: With lockdown-linked restrictions now being rolled back gradually, many organisations have already ended their work-from-home phase and started operating from the offices. Still, luckily for us, we could extend our work-from-home period for a longer time; being an organisation with digital space, we didn’t face difficulties operating from our respective homes. Now with us expanding our team, we have planned to resume our services from the office premises from the mid of January 2021, ensuring all are following all the mandatory guidelines at all times. Since using public transport can increase the chances of getting infected, we have recommended our employees to avoid public transport to the extent possible. As the crisis continues to unfold, we are devising ways to manage systemic challenges in terms of accelerating transformation and building a pandemic proof workplace.

Rajan Bajaj, founder of tech-driven credit startups, Slice: We reopened our office when the Karnataka government introduced the relaxation in their unlock guidelines earlier this year. However, it is not mandatory for any of our employees to physically come to work. At all times the employee strength at the office remains well below 30 percent capacity and the default mode for all our meetings is virtual. We will go back to a regular office schedule only when all our employees genuinely feel safe and comfortable to return. Until then, we will continue to work in a virtual setup, which our teams have adapted really well to. We have made some pivotal decisions during this time and launched new offerings. In fact, during this period we have also strengthened our top deck by onboarding our CTO, CFO, Head of collections, Head of design among several others. If anything, this pandemic has really helped all of us tap into and unleash our self-motivation and drive.

Anand Ayyadurai, co-founder and CEO, scooter and bike rental provider, Vogo: The pandemic has impacted working and commuting patterns significantly over the last two quarters. However, we expect that this change in commuting patterns in India will be temporary, given our working culture and expect that most of our colleagues will be back in office early next year.

There are multiple kinds of roles within our organisation. Firstly, field operations roles which involve maintaining our vehicles and interacting with customers during vehicle handover. Secondly, desk roles which involve primarily working on computers. We have taken a different approach with each of these. For field operations roles, their role involves going out to our vehicles and potentially interacting with our customers. In their case, we have equipped them with multiple safety measures which help them and our customers and introduced processes which reduce contact with customers during vehicle handover. With our desk roles, we are providing the option to attend office for certain teams which may need to come in, while maintaining adequate social distancing measures. The rest of the teams are reimbursed for their cost of connectivity for working from home. We are seeing now that many of our colleagues want to start coming to office. We will continue to give colleagues the option to work from home in the coming months, but expect that most of them will come in from the beginning of next year.