PSUs prepare for the pandemic workday

MUMBAI: A big change is underway for public sector undertakings (PSUs), where compulsory physical presence in office could be a thing of the past, at least for a significant number of employees.Leading PSUs including Indian Oil Corp, Power Finance Corp, lenders such as State Bank of India and Bank of Baroda have started seeing the value of work from home, which they were forced to adopt amid the Covid-19 outbreak.“It can be the order of the day in the coming days,” said PK Singh, director (commercial) in charge of human resources at PFC, which has provided laptops, videoconferencing app and set up the entire IT backend for 80% of its people to work from home.“This will create a new work culture and environment. As a result, we will end up with enhanced productivity, increased motivation and work life balance,” said Singh.Concurred Indian Oil director (HR) Ranjan Kumar Mohapatra: “The Covid-19 scenario has confirmed our belief that a good percent of our administrative workforce can operate from home, thereby reducing stress on assets, while maintaining higher level of productivity.”Indian Oil, the country’s largest oil refiner and fuel retailer, has started the process of identifying functions and roles which can operate from home without affecting productivity. The company has more than 33,000 employees of which nearly 40% started working from home immediately after the lockdown was imposed. “However, as it stands today, nearly 70% of them (of the 40% that was operating remotely) are working from home, while the rest have started operating from offices,” said Mohapatra. Others such as SBI and Bank of Baroda may have more work-from-home options opening up in the future. “We will finetune these WFH concepts and some of it will stay,” said Joydeep Dutta Roy, Bank of Baroda’s head for strategic HR and HR integration. “It has a big cost and time-saving advantage for companies, apart from giving more flexibility to the employees and saving travel time,” added Roy.“State Bank of India has a total of 2.56 lakh employees and a significant percentage of employees are working from home depending upon their job profiles or necessities,” said Alok Kumar Choudhary, the deputy managing director for human resources at SBI. They mostly include staff in corporate and regional offices.Enabling WFH needed setting up of IT backup and putting security systems in place. Now that the companies have already put in place the infrastructure, it will be much easier to institutionalise the WFH system, said experts.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3f9Mp4Y