It is back to work-from-home for startups as India stares at third wave of pandemic 

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With the number of Covid-19 cases surging in India because of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, some of the country’s biggest internet companies and startups are taking no chances.

Over half a dozen companies Moneycontrol spoke to said they have moved to the work from home (WFH) model fully again, with no plans to return to office in the foreseeable future. They’ve also stepped up testing for employees and announced special leaves and incentives for those who have tested positive for Covid-19, and put business travel on the back burner.

India’s leading e-commerce platform Flipkart has advised its employees to not come to the office for the next two weeks or until further notice. It has also been organising vaccination camps at its facilities across the country for its supply chain employees, apart from organising sessions to cover key aspects of vaccination and address concerns around Covid-19.

Fintechs such as Razorpay, Jupiter and Plum Insurance, apart from startups such as Pepper Content that had plans for a hybrid model, are fully back to having employees working from home.

“Around 60 percent of our staff was working from the office. But now we have asked everyone to work from home. We have started working on sharing a helpline number with employees and will help those who have tested positive,” said Jitendra Gupta, founder, and CEO of neobank Jupiter.

Jupiter was also supposed to move to a bigger office from April but that plan may now get pushed by a few months, depending on how the situation develops.

Razorpay, which has nearly 2,000 employees spread across Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai, is also fully back to WFH.

“We arranged a voluntary testing camp yesterday (January 3) and shut our offices. Anyway working from the office was voluntary but now even that has been stopped,” Harshil Mathur, co-founder, and CEO of Razorpay, said.

Tiger Global-backed Plum Insurance declared complete WFH on January 4 due to the rising cases and also asked its employees based across cities to hold back on their relocation plans for now.

“We are recommending all our team members to go back to virtual meetings. Health and safety first— no compromise with that,” said Abhishek Poddar, founder of Plum Insurance.

Pepper Content’s co-founder and CEO Anirudh Singla said they had planned for a complete return to office but that is now mothballed after the Omicron scare and expects WFH to continue for the next 1-1.5 months at least.

The other aspect that has taken a hit is business travel, which witnessed an uptick in the last few months as people logged out of Zoom to meet in person instead. Jupiter and content-to-commerce platform Good Glamm Group said work-related travel will take a backseat.

“We are stopping travel which took off in Q4 and was a welcome change for everyone. We hadn’t seen our customers in a long time and really doubling down on that was very crucial for us,” said Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Mad Street Den.

Unlike the second wave, which blindsided many companies, startups have playbooks in place now which they are tapping to cope with a possible third wave and minimise disruption in business.

“I think we’re better prepared now. We’re making sure we’re obsessively planning our next two quarters down to very specific details so that should we go back to 100 percent remote, which we just might, we’ll all have at least worked out all the nuances and can go back to 2020-2021 WFH protocols but with way more clarity,” Asokan said.

While Pepper Content is formally creating a remote, hybrid policy, Good Glamm Group’s chief people officer Kartik Rao said the startup had made a business contingency plan to ensure it has a framework-led backup for all critical roles in the company. Mathur of Razorpay said near-term disruptions will not have an impact as their approach was anyway to have a hybrid workplace.