“Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time,” said Alvin Toffler.
The corona virus has spelt the death knell of many traditional working patterns. The biggest change to have emerged in the pandemic is the work from home concept. Not that this idea is alien to many of us. Since the time we have had our own laptops, many of us in some way or the other have been working from home. The big difference today is the awakening in many of us that work does not only get done at your workplace. Remote working is a bitter pill that many of us have been forced to gulp. This is more an attitudinal shift that will have serious repercussions on the commercial real estate segment. The area where our office is based – what is known as the Nariman Point of Panaji – has lots of office spaces to let out – and the demand for them has been on the slide since the outbreak of COVID-19.
Earlier this June, I came across a news report that a FMCG major based in south India was shutting their headquarters and putting a major part of their office building – nearly 40,000 square feet of prime office space owned by the company on Chennai’s up-market Cenotaph Road was up for rent. The company boss, CK Ranganathan ensured that the entire staff would work from home permanently. “COVID-19 taught us that bringing people together under one roof was not good, which meant that ‘work from home’ (WFH) was a decision that we were forced to take,” said Ranganathan while talking to a news website. “Over the course of the last three months, however, we have seen productivity go up and travel time saved. In all, this totals to an employee putting in an extra 55 days per-year,” he added.
According to the company, they realised that they could hire talent from anywhere across the state and let them work from their small towns, which contributed to better economic dispersion since this talent would not have to come to Chennai, and to a physical office space. The company meeting efficiency also saw major improvement given that their company executives ended up speaking to the point on virtual meetings.
What has emerged from this paradigm shift is that management and workers have had to rewire themselves to meet the common objective – of getting work done. Of course, it requires resolve to pull off a decision that shatters age-old practices of working from a centralised office space. It also makes you look at the big picture of the productivity that could be managed without the bells and whistles of being under one roof.
The other factor is that of trust. Many managers do not trust that work gets done when their team members are at home. Agreed, our homes are not yet wired for doing work – just like no one believed that someday our children would have to attend classes from home. It all boils down to the attitudinal aspect – the faster we accept that these are unprecedented times which calls for measures hitherto untried and unexplored – the better it is for us.
With cases rising in Goa, WFH is a harsh reality that has to be accepted. The economics of the matter is that business and transactions per se are at their all time low – for just about everybody. Customer interaction has ebbed. However, as an entrepreneur, one has to keep pushing the envelope to keep the momentum of one’s enterprise going.
The other reality is also for those fantasising the sudden disappearance of the coronavirus – and dreaming of a post COVID world. Where I for one would welcome such an occurrence – make no mistake that the new order of work and business is already here. If your business is lucky to survive the attack of COVID, the practice of how businesses are conducted now has changed for real
