Companies like IBM, Google, SAP and others let staff work from home, officially
Date: 06-Jan-2012
MUMBAI:
Anita Guha has been working from her home in Mumbai for the past 10
years. She facilitates leadership development programmes for IBM. She
opted to work from home
when she had her second daughter. She didn't want to miss out on her
children's early years. Later she found herself taking on mostly global
roles, where she could be more productive at home. She could also save
time on commuting to work. IBM was fine with the arrangement.
Guha says not everybody in IBM was happy with the deal she received.
"But IBM has moved a long way since then. There are lots more people
working from home today, many men too, at least partially, and nobody
raises an eyebrow anymore," she says.
In India, IBM has perhaps been the earliest to push this trend. But
increasingly, thanks partly to these early leaders and partly to
technology more and more companies are making the option available to
employees.
Google offers employees in India flexible work timings and the authority to
define their own schedule and type of work. SAP allows employees to work
one day a week from home. Some have formal work-from-home policies, but
with the condition that employees have to work it out with their
manager.
Saritha Raghavan, HR solutions
analyst at Juniper, had been advised by her doctor to take special care
when she was expecting a baby. "Since my parents lived in Kerala and my
spouse had an extremely busy work schedule, it was very difficult for
me to cope alone. Juniper supported me at this juncture and permitted me
to work from Kerala," she says.
Vishak Gopinath, part of the corporate communications team at Cisco India, says he frequently works from home. "I also often leave the
office early to beat the evening traffic, and then work from home." Rony
Thomas, corporate communications manager at HP India, says the facility
has been a boon for him ever since he and wife Priya, who also works,
had a baby 19 months ago. He says the focus in HP is on getting the work
done. "A lot of people take calls late in the night or early morning,
so we are flexible about the day timings. You have to work it out with
the manager," he says.
In most companies, it ultimately depends on the manager, and a stuck-up
manager can ruin things for his team. There are certain duties that
lend themselves more easily to remote working, and managers in these
functions may be more liberal. "In my finance team, everyone is allowed
to work from home once a week," says an Accenture employee who did not
want to be named. And when she had a baby a few months ago, there were
times when she worked up to three days a week from home.
But it may not be so simple for those who are in engineering teams with
strict deadlines to meet, or certain critical administrative or
security roles, or where remote access is low.
It also depends on the maturity of employees. "We may not allow junior
employees, those who have recently joined to work from home. The manager
has to reach a certain comfort level with them before he allows that,"
says Subash Babu, manager for technical documentation at Juniper. That's
because work-from-home entails a certain discipline. "I have had
experiences where I have not been able to reach people who work from
home."
IBM's Anita Guha says the system ultimately works on trust and goal setting. "It takes time to build that trust."
Posted By : Neha Agarwal
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