Great learning from Covid for Management in the Indian context ..

It's been almost a year since we have been living with Covid virus around the world since the virus erupted from Wuhan, China on 31 December 2019. I remember how during the first week of March, we did a role play in the MBA second semester class in Alliance University Bangalore on the impact of Covid virus around the world. (click here), totally unmindful that the virus would bring global life and activity to a standstill for almost eight months..

After almost a year I happened to interact with my friend and colleague in a reputed Indian tyre manufacturing company on what has been the most interesting and important learning from Covid during the past one year. My interaction with this Plant Manager overseeing installation of a tyre plant in Western India during the Covid time has been very educative and enlightening ..

1. Productive use of time : Collaboration and meetings through MS Teams has brought down lot of unnecessary travel, meetings reducing wasteful time and expenses, leading to higher productivity of managers, engineers and field staff. 

2. Confidence Booster : The experience during this Covid period though challenging, has been a morale booster, helping improve confidence in our own staff than depending on foreign and domestic consultants.  

3. Better Digital collaboration : Project Management is not the same again. We have learnt what were the reasons for project delay and how digital collaboration and communication could effect faster decision making. 

4. Lower overall costs : Reduction of unnecessary travel, stay and avoidable interactions have brought down the incurred costs.Project execution costs have come down leading to better overall cost management  

5. Improvement in cleanliness and hygiene : Visible improvement is seen in factory cleanliness and hygiene, leading to better working conditions, appreciation and better input of effort by employees.. 

6. Better safety standards :   Covid has brought about better awareness and practice of improved employee safety standards both from health and occupational safety perspectives

7. Green standards : There is overall better appreciation and awareness of green standards related to the environment, lowering pollution levels, lowering air and water contamination and improved personnel safety.

8. Permanent changes : Changes are here to stay : whatever changes have come about over the past one year is here to stay and improve the shopfloor and overall organisational management

The industrial workers and leaders will benefit a lot from these new hygienic practices and learnings in the future ..

George        (thanks to Saji Varghese, (ex-CET ''90) Plant Manager, MRF tyres for sharing his understanding and insightful thoughts on how Covid has positively influenced the chemical industry and worked positively in improving productivity and worker efficiency in Indian industry)