| |OCTOBER 20229across the country. Users who were used to personal in-teraction had to now get retrained using other mediums of communication. The adoption of this took the most amount of time.Once the above four challenges were addressed, re-mote working/WFH became relatively hassle free, with us-ers becoming, on occasions, even more productive than the pre-pandemic days!!Observations on remote working/WFHRemote working/WFH due to the pandemic, has thrown up some very interesting observations:Reduction is Paper Usage: A happy unexpected conse-quence of the lockdown has been a reduction in paper usage caused by reduction in printing. Since, during the lockdown, it wasn't physically possible to sign documents, digital sig-nature solutions (which have been around for a while now) became popular. Users and managements realised that with the appropriate technologies it really isn't necessary to print documents anymore, unless mandated by law. The usage of such digital signature solutions can go a long way in contributing to the environment sustainability initia-tives and efforts of a company.Increased Incidents of Hardware Failure: Incidents of hardware failure have increased during the lockdown. This could be attributed to fluctuations in the electricity supply in most parts of the country. In our experience apart from a very few metros, most other cities experience fluctuations in the electricity supplied. `Unclean' supply of electricity results in damage to sensitive electronic equipment (such as laptops) unless a UPS or a stabilizer has been invested in. This unfortu-nately wasn't the case as most WFH users did not foresee this as a long-term situation. Hence, the pandemic has highlighted that the quality of the electricity that is supplied by the local authorities in our cities, towns and villages has definite scope for improvement. Need for Improvement in Network Connectivity: Although most of our users were able to connect to the internet and our software applications, the stability and performance of the connectivity left a lot to be desired. Network infrastructure is another area which must improve in the country.Need for Desktops: One of the many learnings from the pan-demic has been need for desktops. Given the paucity of space in residences in some of our cities and towns, it makes more sense to procure laptops instead of desktop even though desktops cost less. In future emergencies at least one activi-ty (renting of laptops) from the business continuity checklist, can be struck off.Improved Technology Awareness & Process Compliance: Due to the new working environment users were forced to adapt to new technologies such as the collaborative solutions mentioned above. Users have been forced to get a lot more process oriented. Eg.· Logging in issues into ticketing systems to ensure reso-lution of issues, as against just hopping across to the IT support staff and reporting issues verbally. · Improved documentation for assigning, reporting, and reviewing activities undertaken, vis-à-vis verbal interac-tion as was the case in the pre-pandemic days.What the future holds for the remote working/WFH conceptOnce the lockdown was imposed and employees were well settled with their technology infrastructure to work from home, as mentioned above, productivity of employees seemed to improve! Everyone was very happy about this improved productivity and felt that this would be the new normal. Man-agements were happy that not only did productivity increase, office overheads too reduced. However, a major point needs to be noted here is that due to the lockdown everything was closed, hence the distractions too were less. Thereby result-ing in increased productivity. The WFH is purely a temporary business continuity short term measure. As the covid cases around the country reduce and the restrictions lifted, every-thing around has begun to open up. In such a scenario, distrac-tions increase too. WFH will cease to be as productive as it has been during the lockdown and hence will not remain a very attractive proposition for management. I am sure this drop in productivity is already being experienced by many now. At best, management will need to exercise the remote working/WFH option on a case-to-case basis. Therefore, in my opinion in the long run the new hybrid model of working will not be applicable to all employees but to those disciplined few who remain more effective and productive working remotely. The Pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns have been a great `use case' for business continuity planning. The biggest benefit of the Pandemic has been the refinement of the Business Conti-nuity Plans of companies! The usage of such digital signature solutions can go a long way in contributing to the environment sustainability initiatives and efforts of a company
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