Question

examples of changes in approaches to how and where employees work because of the coronavirus (e.g., telecommuting, job sharing etc). Illustrate with examples from specific companies.examples of changes in approaches to how and where employees work because of the coronavirus (e.g., telecommuting, job sharing etc). Illustrate with examples from specific companies.

Answer 1

The current situation of COVID-19 has forced many companies to adopt work from home policy. However, there are companies like IBM where is it not a new normal, they have been promoting the work from home culture since long back and today they are one of the most comfortable companies in mitigating the business continuity challenges under the difficult times imposed by the spread of coronavirus diseases.

The biggest problem for companies where the first time work from home policy is being implemented. For new adopters,  it is very difficult to manage the behavioral aspects of employee and maintaining their productivity but for companies like IBM, this COVID-19 challenge is eased out as their staffs are very well familiar about the discipline of work from home, telecommuting, job sharing and improving the productivity while saving the time of travel to office spaces.

Therefore, from the well-established paradigm of workers travel to work, now it is the work which is traveling to work. For IBM philosophy is simple as work is where the phone is. The most important requirement is to have a seamless flow of information among the teams, colleagues, superiors, and subordinates.

Today we have very good internet connectivity and it is omnipresent with fairly good bandwidth and this ready infrastructure has helped companies to quickly come out of the grim situation of COVID-19 and they have been able to meet the deliveries while their staff is working from home.

This COVID-19 situation has forced those companies who did not believe in work from home culture to either close their work to continue to work from home. Such companies are going to realize that it was always possible the only thing they did not have the courage to adopt the change.

IBM is leveraging the virtual workspaces like conference cloud and virtual attendees are being used, the company has also asked for digitally signed Non-Disclosure Agreement from employees to meet the criteria set by the clients.

In fact, this new virtual spaces has removed the walls between the people at the physical offices and teams are working a more collaborative way to meet the deadline and complete the assigned KPIs. When the situation started to become alarming as the cases across the globe started to emerge SAP was one of the proactive companies to close their office and adopted the work from home policy asked employees to work remotely and conduct virtual meetings only.