COVID-19 has changed people’s lives – how they spend their time, how they manage housework, how they socialise, and how they work. Work from home (WFH) has become the norm, at least for now. How does it work, for both employee and employer?
First, some data – all from reliable sources and in the public domain:
• Employees in India work 32 minutes longer (about 6% more) during WFH than they used to when attending office.
• A middle-income employee spends 10% of his/her income in transport costs to/from office (international norm).
• An average employee spends two hours a day in going to work and returning home daily.
• Office space rentals in Indian cities range from Rs123 per sq ft per month (pm) in Mumbai to Rs43 per sq ft/pm in Ahmedabad (H2FY18-19 numbers). Poor Kolkata doesn’t even feature in this list – perhaps there are hardly any offices left in the business hub of yesteryear!
• In a ‘high density’ office layout, the space provided per staff member is 80-150 sq ft, including common areas, such as conference rooms, passages, lunch room, etc.
Let us put these numbers into context.
An employee who works exclusively from home saves time and money vis-à-vis one who works exclusively in an office. (S)he:
- works half an hour longer daily, but saves two hours of commuting, and thus saves one and a half hour a day, plus
- saves 10% of his/her income because nothing is spent on commuting to work.
For an employer, a staff member who works exclusively from home, vis-à-vis one who works exclusively in the office:
- Works 6% longer hours (based on a 45 hour week) for the same pay.
- Saves between Rs4,300 (Ahmedabad) and Rs12,300 (Mumbai) per month in office space rent (based on 100 sq ft per head).
Voila! Both are better off with WFH!
An added boon is the reduced pressure on public transport, if significant numbers of office workers work at home, plus the reduction in emissions and savings in oil imports.
Ah, there are some bugs in the ointment, of course.
WFH does have some drawbacks for the employee, such as:
- In today’s crowded homes, especially with one or two people engaged in WFH, there may not be a secluded area where one can work without disturbance and with adequate space for papers, etc. Where does one sit?
- People have complained about being chained to the desk and having no work-life separation.
For the employer, all the ‘benefits’ aren’t tangible, because:
- 5% more hours do not automatically mean 5% more productivity.
- It is not so easy to get rid of office space quickly and save money. Sometimes, the employer is locked in through ownership or long-term leases.
- WFH does not provide the intangible ‘feel’ of direct contact, interpretation of body language, bonding between team members, etc. It is remote and somewhat unfriendly, which results in some reduction in the quality of the work produced.
- All the jobs cannot be done remotely. Some office space must be maintained and staff have to come in periodically for meetings and briefings.
- There are costs for hardware, software and connectivity for WFH staff.
There are emotional and behavioural issues as well for employees on WFH.
Some employees feel that bosses are expecting them to stay ‘chained to the desk’ at all times, be available on the phone even into late evening, and work on weekends, on the basis that the employee is ‘just sitting at home anyway’. Some people feel claustrophobic due to being at home almost 24x7, not meeting work colleagues face-to-face and missing coffee-break chats and corridor gossip. Some miss dressing up to go to work.
Whether one likes it or not, COVID-19 has imposed WFH on all organisations because you had to either adopt it, or close down your business.
Yes, the WFH genie is out of the bottle. The question is: Will it stay out, or go back in? What will happen after COVID (eventually) goes away? Will WFH still remain, or will businesses revert to status quo ante?
A survey has shown that 74% of Indian office employees would prefer WFH for at least part of their working time. Companies in India (Zomato, Paytm, and Uber) are aggressively re-negotiating office rental contracts, expecting to save as much as one-third of rental costs. So it looks like the benefits of WFH are visible to both employers and employees.
WFH is the new business tool, just as computers were in the 1970s. Asian Paints was a very early adopter of mainframe computers, which it used to set up an efficient tracking and ordering system, coupled with just-in-time deliveries of stock to retailers. This resulted in a substantially higher profit margin and enabled Asian Paints to remain the undisputed market leader in paints for several decades now. Perhaps enterprising employers will use WFH effectively to do better business.
But some glitches have to be ironed out.
- Bosses have to understand that employees must have personal time and space at par with what they had when attending office. Expecting 24x7 availability, just because the employee is at home, is simply not realistic.
- Work has to be measured by output, not by hours. Systems have to be installed to measure, and reward, productivity irrespective of how many, or which hours, that employee puts in while working from home.
- Everyone cannot work comfortably from home. It may be necessary to set up mini-offices in cheap, suburban locations where employees living nearby can come to work.
- 100% WFH is not practical. There must be a mix of WFH days and office days, and schedules have to be worked out to ensure that employees do come to office for a portion of the work week.
- Savings in office space and other costs have to be achieved carefully after working out the ideal home/office work ratio of employees.
Companies where employees enjoy their work, respect their bosses and work better unsupervised, and where the bosses are Theory Y managers who trust and respect their employees, will be the ones to benefit most from WFH.
They will have something to thank COVID-19 for, at last!
(Deserting engineering after a year in a factory, Amitabha Banerjee did an MBA in the US and returned to India. Choosing work-to-live over live-to-work, he joined banking and worked for various banks in India and the Middle East. Post retirement, he returned to his hometown Kolkata and is now spending his golden years travelling the world (until Covid, that is), playing bridge, befriending Netflix & Prime Video and writing in his wife’s travel blog.)
So it should be practical in future, as well.
The only thing is What these corporates will do with such big offices in Cities. particularly those in SEZ which they lease for 50 yrs /100 yrs.
and there may be Govt pressure due to dent in Metro cities economy.. Their grand projects like Metro trains, Flyovers etc may receive a severe blow if IT workforce is dispersed from cities, so the Govt may actually request IT Organizations to re-open offices.
ps- my sentence above is an theoretical example of the same
Regards