Transition to a Work From Anywhere (WFA) culture ..

Happened to listen to a podcast from a HBS Associate Prof. Raj Chaudhury as part of my lectures to students on the Work From Home (WFH) culture.  My interest was particularly high after reading reports from the press that Tata Consultancy Services, the IT giant from India employing almost 4.5 lakh employees and headquartered in Mumbai was seriously thinking of shifting most of its employees to work from home option. TCS is a top employer globally, and has 453,540 employees representing 147 nationalities across 46 countries. 

 
TCS was honored as one of the Fortune Best Big Companies to Work For in 2020. TCS 25x25 policy speaks of less than 25 percent of employees coming to office at any point of time and employees spending less than 25% of their time in the office. Secure Borderless Workspace of TCS is thus a great way to work post-Covid. Many organisations around the world are observing how TCS is able to perform and if the experiment turns successful, may turn to the WFA option.

Work from Home is what TCS is trying to propagate. But Prof. Raj Chaudhary is trying to speak of a still advanced concept Work From Anywhere (WFA). (click here..) Prof. Raj Chaudhary quotes of the US Patent Office deploying this policy from early 2015 and reported a 4.4 % increase in productivity. 

Knowledge workers are specially benefitting from this arrangement as they have the flexibility t work independently from either home or anywhere within the country or outside.

The five Organisational processes that get affedted by this WFA policy are given below -

1. communication 
2. sharing knowledge 
3. socialising 
4. measuring productivity 
5. data privacy and regulation

The benefits to the organisation and employees are manifold as given below

• Freedom to live and work from anywhere in the world
• Better quality of life
• Closer to family
• Greater recreational opportunities
• Move to healthy suburbs instead of living in crowded urban  spaces
• Lower rentals for the organisation and as well as employees,

Liiving in top end spots like Koramangala, JP Nagar etc in bangalore can pull any person behind by as much as INR 30 - 40K every month as rent, while in Bangalore suburbs rents are as low as INR 6000 and even lower in the villages. 

Working on the cloud server and secure communication channels help ease the communication problem. Organising weekly get to-gethers where attendees are selected randomly across hierarchy in circulation, with top management in attendance is a great way to socialise. Since there are no fixed hours of working, employees can work across geographies and time zones without much of adjustment from home. 

Weekends with family and away from work gives relaxation to employees.

Gitlab after implementing WFA policy was able to report $18,000 benefits for each employee.

 The main benefit of this policy in countries like India is going to be reduction in traffic on roads, less pressure on urbanisation and pollution.