11-04-20
Days these days start with a fit of activities & chores which
need to be done before the work from home routine tie us all in. While I can
only guess what others are going through (with work from home routines) for us
these are onerous at time very stressing time. Time flies in these days of
remote working.
Let me explain India was and
is a very auditory work environment, one needs to be in office on time, show
his/her face to supervisors & also attend endless meeting to humor the culture
of work place. The controls on the work (barring large & evolved orgn) are at
most of time auditory in forms of discussions, emails followed by F2F meetings
and at time large round ups to hammer some sense into intractable issues. Largely
this happens as our significant supervisors (say average age of 35 plus)
population has been bred on command & control format to deliver results.
Our biggest employees are IT co’s which get paid basis T&M (Yes I know
output is of some consequence for them), as for the informal sector routines we
see only physical attendance as the barometer of performance. If you are absent
you might as well not get paid is our central thinking.
Now covid make these controls of no use, folks are stuck at home
& supervisory folks are scratching wishing cards to find solutions for how
to control the worker. As is our wont we are moving gradually to new controls,
we have a combination of controls which folks are adjusting to in lock down.
1.
Time sheets: Yes, that bane of
IT projects is going main stream. People are clocking the time spent and
module/work flow time spent on. These time sheets are being done on desktops,
google sheets and collaboration tools which provide a sense of control to
employers. Over a period of time better collaboration tools (in mainstream at
startups) will take over the role and possible automate the reporting &
ranking also.
2.
Conference calls for daily
stats : As if the time sheets are not enough to provide a sense of control, the
boss (emperor of call) speaks and the team meanders across the observable &
important points. And if the calls are of video variety the stress is double
for the participants. Not only they have to be attentive they also have to be
looking good for the calls. This takes away all sense of being at home.
3.
More process-oriented folks are
working the checklist mode to get over the day, especially when the skilled set
doing this is either inaccessible or not able to perform task remotely. This is
restricted to OLTP work flow & time bound processes. Banks being a prime
example of the same (they are under emergency services and have people come to office
as much as possible)
Consequence of all the remote working is that some of our smarter
folks have realized it pays to keep remote work on as the time sheets, trackers
on comp time & in due course cloud work flow will keep efficiency level to
required. They can do away with the establishment cost, cafeteria cost and
transit cost payable to employees in due course. It will also remove subjectivity
in routine work flows and minimize the bias over a period of time. This may perhaps be the start of reducing an employee/worker especially
the routine knowledge variety to a zombie number in the system. Press to start,
crank up speed button and shut down/ discard when not required. So future
of work probably is here for repeatable processes at least, what was coming gradually will hasten for reasons linked to current lock down. Creative, joining the dots
and manipulators (sorry narrators & story teller for Orgn.) are not
disturbed by this turn for now. In fact they have more importance now that post covid
impression are to be done, where the opportunity canvas have to be bigger & hungrier for new prophesies.
As I write this the announcement of sort has been made that the Lock
down will be extended to end of April. So we have more time to discipline ourselves,
imbibe more popcorn thinking about changing habits in 21 days (you have 15 plus
3 available, some more coming after end of month as all of us not going back to
work on same day). Try that elusive Yoga session or reading a book that you
want to & never could. Best start doing things you like and forget about post
covid possibilities.
Here are some of the movies/ songs and documentaries I am watching,
listening or wanting to listen & watch.
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