The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 had brought the business world to a fork in the road: Down one route, shuttered offices. Down the other, companies embracing remote work, showing us how businesses can survive, and thrive, with a fully remote workforce. And, that included fostering strong team bonds and employee relationships. Just because there’s no physical break room or water cooler didn’t mean that companies couldn’t create opportunities for colleagues to connect.

While it was challenging for many to maintain the work-life balance staying at home, around 66 per cent preferred working from home.

While it’s tougher for women working from home and perform multiple roles, the situation was not so great for men either.

Given that majority of the Indian population living in smaller apartments with not adequate number of rooms, not enough WFH tools, or sloppy internet connections, it was a tough ride for most.

There were initial challenges where the organisations would often suspect if employees were productive enough working from home. HR would call the employees to check out for how long they were logged in and when did they log out. The employees, on the other hand, in fear of losing jobs, would try to be available 24x7 or would be overworked by the end of the day.

The scenario has, however, changed rapidly over the past year and on the brighter side, companies are forced to look into flexible hours for women working from home, adopt digital technology such as Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing, provide back-end support to employees, and measure performance with an open mind.

A 2020 report, Reworking Work: Understanding the Rise of Work Anywhere, says that 70 per cent of respondents reported that they were satisfied with their jobs more than before the Covid-19 lockdown. Around 61 per cent realised they could manage the work-from-home culture well during the lockdown. While India witnessed around 1 crore people losing their jobs, the tech jobs witnessed a surge, thanks to the adoption of technology across companies and the work from home model.

Going by the current scenario, around 40 per cent of the workforce can afford to work from home, however, those working in the junior grades or with a less pay structure, like in the restaurants, retail sectors or transportation are more vulnerable to lose their jobs.

With things slowly returning to normalcy, organisations are all set to return to the work from office culture keeping the new normal in place – social distancing, proper sanitisation, and limited physical interactions. But there are still a significant number of employees who still prefer working from home.

Keeping the new normal in mind, experts suggest that employees have acquired hyper communicative and collaborative skills that would help them complete the tasks on time. While TCS in India said that only 25 per cent of its employees would work from the office by 2025 and Wipro extended the work from home policy, it is projected that majority of the workforce would return to work from the office.

Most corporates in the West believe that the trend of working from home would last for two more years at last because of the post-Covid syndromes and the possibility of fresh bouts of infection. Some experts believe that a higher productivity in the WHF system might also influence some companies to make it a permanent system. It would help in achieving better performance from employees as well as cut down on costs of running brick-and-mortar set-ups.

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• Proportion of women working from home in Kerala is 21% more than men with the numbers rising to 55% against 34% post-Covid
• Over 100 million men lost jobs, while 17 million women lost jobs. The fall in employment among men was 29%, compared 39% for women
• Over 70% of people reported their job satisfaction is better than before the lockdowns. Also, 61% of employees feel they can effectively work at home during the Covid-19 restrictions
• About 60% of the employees working in the IT/ITes felt that they saved time by not travelling to the office every day