Sanjay Sakat,Human Resources Manager, Compulink Systems
The basic requirement for telecommuting is connectivity. We provide a laptop and an Internet-enabled cell phone to our employees who telecommute, and who are often travelling all around the country. Despite our physical absence in the office, we are always connected to each other, as well as to office staff, clients, customers, and others. Employees in our organisation have to travel a lot and they stay connected with each other, have important meetings and discussions, and even strategic decisions are taken over conference calls.
Telecommuting helps: there is business demand for mobility, and also, many geographical locations are to be covered.
Satish Parchure, Managing Director, U.S. Interactive, India
First, all thanks to our government for improving broadband facilities and providing us with a better infrastructure. Through improved Internet facilities and better and cost-effective cellular services, tasks assigned to employees can be executed simultaneously. Although our 256 Kbps connections are hardly at par with the T1 connections in other countries, we can still provide satisfactory solutions to our clients and customers.
We’ve reaped the benefits of this practice-in the past, one of our projects was successfully completed by a team of five members; out of five, two were working in India and the others were in different countries. I believe today is the right time to try out the telecommuting model. However, the model is applicable only to those business verticals that involve “batch processing” tasks and projects such as content writing and development.
Security-related concerns had delayed the coming of age of the telecommuting model. However, security risks can now be better managed. As part of a large multinational bank, we adopt international standards in our security solutions, and going forward, we do see an improvement in our ability to adopt telecommuting for our operations.
Dadi Bhote, Executive Director, Hypersoft Technologies
Telecommuting is helping us enjoy cost benefits-office overheads, real-estate costs and infrastructure, retaining key employees, reducing operation costs, and more. This has resulted in raising productivity-to an extent. Also, employees benefit by a reduction in commuting time, efforts, and costs. Flexibility in work timings provides them full freedom to work at their own, convenient timings, and also meet assigned task deadlines.
One important reason for bringing in telecommuting was the ability to hire persons who would normally not be available to work out of an office, in cities where commute times are very long. The practice of such a strategy is possible today because the necessary infrastructure is available. Taking a break from our business operations for a moment, we are working on a new strategy for the expansion of our operations in the near future, with a capacity of about a hundred employees.
Chandrashekhar Nene, Vice President, IT, Kingfisher Airlines
This western concept is at a nascent stage in India, and is one of the models that benefits both the company and employees. Needless to say, along with telephony, the Internet, too, helps in the area of telecommuting. In populated metros such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, a lot of people commute for more than two hours every day. Telecommuting can help not only in converting those man-hours to productive use, it also helps reduce traffic jams, pollution, accidents, and so on.
At the individual level, employees can maintain a balance between professional and personal obligations. This also affects work efficiency. If a person works more efficiently at home than in the office, the telecommuting option should be provided.