On three emails that he sent out to check on IT professionals during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Sijo Kuruvilla, founding CEO of Kerala’s Startup Village, got three different responses. Startup Village is an initiative started by the state to help incubate startup companies and encourage young entrepreneurs.
One person from Canada said it was not difficult to work from home (WFH) because his company has used it before. Another wrote that he struggled to manage time at first but once that was sorted out, he began enjoying WFH. The third opined that WFH appears to suit those who’d like to give time to family as well as work, whereas others felt it is not effective when personal and professional lives are mixed up.
Work from home, as a concept, is not something that traditional workplaces in most parts of India are familiar with. While WFH depends a lot on the kind of work you do, it can take a toll on your psyche, if not on the company’s productivity. There has been no study yet on the economic effects of WFH; however, it appears to have different reactions in different sectors.
Sijo, speaking on the impact on the Information Technology (IT) sector in Kerala, points out that from the employer or boss’s point of view, the graph had at first slipped but then moved up steadily. “Many were initially reluctant about the idea of WFH. They didn’t know how to track work when it’s done digitally. They also feared whether the work would be done properly if they couldn’t address the team, and so on.”
But gradually they began to realise that there are productivity gains. “No extra time is lost. They found good tools to digitally document material. Startups enjoyed other benefits too. One founder told me that it was easier to access people who once used to ask you to go meet them. Now everyone is available on calls,” Sijo says.
Yet another benefit is that sales does not depend on geography anymore. Even a person sitting in the US cannot meet the clients there. Location was not a disadvantage when everyone is working on calls.
However, Sijo admits that an employee may not feel the same way about WFH. There, the graph has been moving the other way, as indicated by one of the emails he got. “Many of them enjoyed it at first – not having to travel, not always being under the gaze of the boss. But still there were challenges faced by certain segments – like people with kids or those staying with in-laws. Many women, especially, found it challenging to work out of home, they’d rather be somewhere else. It’d be a chaos with small kids too at home,” he explains.
One of Sijo’s colleagues told him that factors that otherwise balanced working from home were not available during a lockdown. For instance, one cannot go out for a break or take the kids for an outing.
“Some also get fatigued by back-to-back calls and video calls. In these cases people or companies should invest in asynchronous communication (when immediate response is not expected). Others miss the camaraderie of going to office and interacting with the team. Some are trying alternatives like catching up for lunch on Zoom (video conferencing app). If you look at the age profile, it is mostly just-out-of-college younger employees who find it more dissatisfying not being in a social environment,” Sijo says.
However, IT is only one part of the story. While you can find tools to make WFH easy, you can’t always replicate a work setting at home. “It is true that for certain positions, even within the job structure, WFH is built into it. That is, however, not true for most jobs,” says Meera Sunny, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at IIT, Gandhinagar.
“At first the idea was that you are expected to do at home the same work you did in office. There was an implication that the workspace doesn’t matter. That is not true. When you leave home in the morning to go to work, you know what you are supposed to do. You are familiar with the tasks in the work environment. But when you’re suddenly home, you need to reorient yourself to a new work culture that you don’t know at all. Work is also not always done in isolation,” Meera says.
Talking about her profession, teaching, Meera says it’d be very difficult to do from home even through all the online video conferencing options. The interactions of a classroom cannot be replicated. There is also the bigger question of democracy. Students who have gone home to their villages may not have access to high speed internet. “Even if it is one or two students who may miss out, is it fair to go ahead without them? I don’t think so,” Meera says.
The same logic, she says, can be stretched to a lot of other kinds of jobs. Workspace has its value and you cannot just replace it. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t need offices at all,” she opines.
There are also the different perspectives to consider, as Sijo pointed out too. For some, office is a space where they don’t need to deal with household tasks and family matters. They leave the domestic space in the morning and go back to it in the evening. “But you don’t have that luxury anymore. You’re still struggling to figure out how to order your tasks. What is so obvious when you’re in office needn’t be so at home. Sometimes it is the work environment that tells you what you have to do.”
Time management is another issue. “You’re not just managing the expectation of your work but a complex network of other people also trying to work online. You can’t put in 7 to 8 hours of work the way you do at office. So chances are you stress yourself out even more,” Meera says.
Then there are the kids. Meera says that with schools choosing to schedule classes online, this places an additional burden on the parents, one of whom will need to sit with the kid while also getting their work done.
“It is like taking your kid to work. Problem is you’ve been thrown into a new environment with no knowledge or instructions on how to manage it. Ideally one should sit down and make a timetable of the hours they can practically sit and work at. It’s an ongoing challenge and if we don’t manage it properly, at one point we’d give up on everything and just watch Netflix,” Meera adds.