Work from Home or Work from Anywhere: Challenges and Rewards
Dr. Shalini Sharma, Associate Professor, Area Chair – Communication and Development
“Change is the Law of Nature and the One Who doesn’t choose to be, Loses to be in the Battle”.
The New Normal brought a new format of working to us: Work from Home, which transformed our work culture drastically. Innovation was on the forefront converting the obstructions into an opportunity for the transition of the Gig- economy. The pandemic year 2020 as is famously known has brought several transformations and reinventions in the working mechanism of the companies across industries globally. The year coming ahead will continue with transitions and predict a lot of automation in the jobs, policies, working mechanism and off- course the customer demands.
IT and automation share a huge credit in materializing these transitions. The technologies whose demand is and will surge are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, IoT, Robotics Process Automation and Activated Analyses. As per Chaitanya Sreenivas- HR Leader India/South Asia, IBM, the Gig-economy too heavily banks on these technologies and the demand of these skills will be on the boom. IoT has been in the industry since years now and when the bell rang when we were almost diving deep into troubled waters its horizon expensed. It’s the consortium of the mentioned technologies which has changed the world even the more.
The technology gave us the reward of working from the comfort of our homes. The advancements in technology have made the life even more flexible by working from anywhere. It’s no more a work station that a person needs to be confined to be it home or office for delivering your services, rather now it could be anywhere from where one can cater his duties from. The employee can sign in from a café, a car, a cab, or even during travelling by a public transport; saving the travelling time and eventually rewarding the job life of employees spent in travelling to relish it on their own. Just like a gizmo which flies to the destination at the blink of an eye.
WFA era signals the organizations with all the shades that the pandemic has accelerated. And as discussed above these advancements need to be addressed to by nurturing those skills in the work force. The challenge here is that the new digitally enabled manpower could be hired but the existing workforce also needs to be transformed digitally enabled workforce. The collaboration can only be successful then when the virtual world is as interactive as the physical world. The implementation of digital collaboration tools like video-conferencing, virtual whiteboards, file-sharing, team rooms, team calendars and chats will only lead to work closely with the colleagues and clients.
The phygital era demands the workforce to ameliorate its skills, breakdown their silos, collaborate seamlessly thereby creating a dynamic environment to process and perform in the system. The hackneyed term – “New Normal” which is the amalgamation of physical and digital needs to be conventionally accepted by the gig workers too. This is where the future lies and we accept it now or not eventually it’s the terminus to be.
