News »Browse Articles » IT pays to work at home as technology brings world closer

Global hr experts abhor the idea of taking work home. But local HR managers have turned the debate on its head: they now prod employees to carry their office home. A raft of technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard, Nokia Siemens Networks, Dell, Cisco and IBM reckon that letting employees work from home not only saves office expenses, but also helps ramp up productivity by saving precious time wasted in India’s labyrinthine peak-hour traffic.

“If I commute to compute, I’m wasting critical time,” says Seema Raj, an environment manager working for HP India’s Bangalore unit. Increasingly, these firms shift to a 60:40 ration while planning new local units: for every 60 employees who punch in their cards at office, 40 work from home.

Linked to deliverables, the system helps employees have a better work-life balance while for the firm, it means cost saved on precious real estate, power consumption and office maintenance staff.

Dell India, for instance, doesn’t even have an office in Mumbai, probably its most important market. HP India has a sales/maintenance network spanning over a dozen cities, but has large offices only in Gurgaon, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai. “With better connectivity, collaborative tools and broadband availability, options to work remotely have increased. The trend to cut office work is definitely on,” says Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India.

This new empowerment is led by high-tech computers and communication tools. Employees working from home are given web cameras, WebEx (or any other collaborative communication tool to set up meetings), laptops and VPN access or tunneling software to log into office, internet connection and datacards.

They are also empowered with an internet protocol-based communicator, which will rest as a deskphone icon on the employee’s laptop screen. So, if you dial in a Cisco employee on a landline, the call will reach him, whether he’s in office or not.

“Quality of life gets better with this,” says Subhash Rao, Cisco’s HR director. Cisco has done away with the attendance system. Instead, there’s a designated vacation time, else you are deemed to be at work.

Nokia Siemens’ HR head Reema Malhotra says that on any typical day, 20% of the staff (out of 11,000) may not be in office. “We empower people to do tasks,” she says.

About 10% of HP India’s 32,000 workforce works from outside office. At Dell India, about 20% of the 12,000 employees work remotely, akin to IBM, Nokia Siemens Networks, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. At IBM, about 42% of its global workforce of around 400,000 works from outside office. The technology major did not share India numbers. While the trend is not new to India the critical difference is that earlier the numbers were minuscule. The employees got to work from outside office largely when a certain need arose.

Says Ganesh Margabandhu, VP & executive sponsor, work-life integration IBM India & South Asia: “The whole definition of work has changed. There are jobs not fixed to a seat and there are jobs dependent on infrastructure, good ambiance, like the call centre or a central command centre. What we consciously look for is the role eligible for mobile work.”

Source:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/IT-pays-to-workho

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