LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM — If working from home is to remain sustainable in the long-term, employers must pay attention to remote workers’ needs, according to some experts in the field.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Innovation Forum 2021, Brian Kudeba, VP of IT strategy and transformation at the Ipsen Group, asserted, “To make employee well-being more of a priority, companies need to listen to their employees, to be flexible in the work arrangements [and] at the same time, balance the development of their culture and keep that connection of well-being as well as company culture.”
TCS Global Head of Digital Workplace Practice Krish Ashok similarly honed in on the well-being of remote workers, urging companies to take a holistic approach.
“Eighteen months of working from home has presented lots of opportunities and challenges for organizations,” he said. “For starters, we’ve only been seeing each other’s homes and pets and kids on tiny Zoom and Microsoft Teams windows. But the lack of human contact is starting to really wear people down and cause stresses.
“One big opportunity here is for companies to start seeing employees beyond just the transactional nature of them being an employee, but as a full person, so meaning that employee experience is not now about a work-life balance, where it was a hard sort of boundary, [but] now a work-life continuum.
“So, you do work, you switch to life, you come back to work. So, the company needs to see employee experience truly through the sense of wellness to be sustainable in the future.”
Opportunity born of challenge
Milind Lakkad, TCS executive VP and global head of human resources, earlier this year also acknowledged the opportunities born of the unexpected and evolving remote working environment.
He noted that the burning question of how employers can make remote work “more productive and engaging for employees in the work order”, and thereby ultimately more sustainable, is one he grapples with constantly in his position as head of HR in “a global firm with more than 469,000 employees”.
In a published article, Lakkad proposed five ways companies can “foster a culture of purpose, engagement and performance among far-flung workers”. As for TCS itself, he said the company “sees the shift to a hybrid work environment — some people in the office, some at home, others at client sites — as an opportunity to improve our performance for clients”.
Find remote working opportunities today by visiting www.jobs.remoteworker.co.uk
Links:
TCS Perspective: “Building a Powerful and Passionate Remote Workforce” by Milind Lakkad - https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs/pdf/perspectives/volume-14/hire-identify-nurture-top-talent-best-practices.pdf
