Cross-skill opportunity and effective communication: How IT companies are doing Productivity Optimization & Management

In these uncertain times, employee engagement and experiences significantly impact an organizations’ ability to survive and thrive. However, for the IT industry, experts believe the pandemic is acting as a catalyst for one of the most significant workplace transformations in history, affecting standard ways of working and organizations' very culture and fabric.

ETHRWorld took a round with experts to assess and highlight how the disruption-shielded information technology industry is conducting, arguably the most crucial activity: Productivity Optimization & Management.

Hard to create the ‘water cooler’ moment

Industry leaders said employee performance has suffered because of timing issues, resulting in lower productivity. But they opine this monstrous problem can now be resolved with a simple solution.

“Businesses should set a work schedule for their employees in the same way they did before pandemics, but with a virtual twist. [Besides] Employers must establish fixed working hours for their employees and not require them to work overtime,” said Sushant Patnaik, Head - HR, Aeris Communications.

Patnaik also pointed out that sometimes it is not possible to create the ‘water cooler’ moment from the office during work from home (WFH), resulting in loss of collaboration. And to resolve this, he said, “Informal virtual meetings without an official agenda will encourage employees to share and collaborate.”

With more than 60 per cent of the employees working in rural areas, GoFrugal saw the biggest challenge: Establishing remote internet capability and reliability. And remote collaboration and communication with bigger teams were initially time-consuming.

According to Amudha H, Vice President - People Delight, GoFrugal, setting up focused collaboration groups, timely review and stand-up with the right stakeholders helped reduce the communication over-heads.

Tackling Covid absenteeism with effective communication

Covid-led disruption gave birth to a plethora of workplace transformation among which increasing Covid absenteeism is a major challenge. To ensure that productivity remains unhampered, managers said that they are seeking the feedback of employees to identify areas where productivity has suffered and are working on tackling these issues.

For Mohan K, VP - Human Resources, Indium Software, Covid Absenteeism is best managed at Indium through proactive one-on-one connect from the HR team.

“We make sure they get sufficient rest and time-off. This helps them be efficient and effective when they come back!” he said.

Indium has shadow/backup resources for all projects and has increased the same to mitigate Covid absenteeism. Besides, even after the restrictions were lifted, the company operated with a 100 per cent WFH model.

At GoFrugal, employees are not confined within a role. The company always asks members to try their hands on all the related works to their role thus stretching their boundaries. For instance, a product consultant can sell and a salesman can also implement. This cross-skill opportunity, Amudha H said, did create more opportunities and growth.

Over the last two years, GoFrugal focused majorly on skill-up. The company created an in-house app where learning courses, opportunities were automated based on the current skill of the employee.

“For all customer-facing teams, their communication with customers was reviewed and based on their skill-level, the learning was automatically assigned on a daily/weekly basis,” Amudha H said.

Tech tools are a must

Before the pandemic, while many organizations had started experimenting with WFH and virtual collaboration, the pandemic turbocharged the process forcing most people to switch to complete remote working overnight. Since the office is now completely in the virtual world, necessary tools are indispensable for the success of this arrangement.

At Aeris, all the employees are encouraged to keep their availability status updated on several collaboration tools to allow others visibility into their availability. In addition, shared cloud drives are used by teams to make sure that data is safe and at the same time selective access can be provided

Kovai.co employees started using MS Teams almost four years back and all its internal communication has been routed through it, thereby reducing the number of internal emails going back and forth. Even demo calls with its prospective leads have been done primarily using MS Teams and Zoom.

“With the majority of our leadership team based out of the UK from the beginning, they have been literally running the company remotely for the last 10 years. Hence moving all our employees to the WFH model was smooth for us,” said Saravana Kumar, Founder and CEO, Kovai.co.

Remote working did accelerate the in-house adoption of GoFrugal’s learning app “myGuru”. With this tool, the employees could add new courses, assign, assess and get certified on the skill.

GoFrugal encouraged its employees to share success regularly in their reflection of the day's work virtually. Amudha H said this enabled the people to share learning, success regularly which thus boosted the performance drastically.