Enter Return to Office, Exit WFH

 

Remote work that kept companies afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic has now fallen out of favour of corporate czars. HR managers of various big corporations have issued return-to-office mandates and are exerting pressure on employees to be present in offices. In the post-pandemic world, companies are eager to return to the pre-2020 working norms as they brace for an economic downturn.  

The latest to do so is e-commerce giant Amazon which has mandated managers to sack employees if they don’t attend office three times a week. Earlier, banking majors JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had issued directives to do away with hybrid mode and want employees to attend office on all five working days of a week. 

Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services in June scrapped work from home and wants its employees to be present in the office five days a week.

Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy also has a dim view of letting employees work from home and feels it leads to the waning of institutional culture. Regarding the Indian context, Murthy said the WFH system does not work as people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.

However, Infosys has not totally scrapped work from home option, though it claims that the number of employees attending office was steadily increasing. It claimed as many as 70% of its employees are on campus at any given point in the week. 

Boost to Collaboration

The reasons being cited by various companies for bringing people back to the office include productivity, collaboration, training, and networking. Managers feel that face-to-face interactions improve camaraderie among employees and boost collaborative efforts. On the other hand, remote work runs the risk of employees working in silos.

The other reasons include lack of supervision and training, especially for younger employees. This could seriously affect their learning curve.

Lastly, there is the overhead expenses like real estate. Many of these companies have continued paying rents and leases for the office space even during lockdowns.

Interestingly, Tesla and X chairman Elon Musk has even added a dimension of morality to this issue. He observed that working from home was possible only for a certain set of white-collar employees, while others had no choice but to attend office. Hence he felt that remote work was ‘morally wrong’.

WFH as a Saviour

When the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic made us hunker down in our homes to duck the invisible virus, and the governments imposed lockdowns to contain its spread; employers and managers saw remote work as the go-to option to keep their businesses running.

While industries like software have used this option on a limited scale in the past, for others such as banking, insurance, and publishing it was a headlong plunge into unchartered waters with too many imponderables. 

This unplanned experiment, thrust upon them by the virus, forced them to shift work from office premises to the 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study tables doubling up as a home office. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and Slack messenger provided the tenuous link in the socially distanced world to keep the offices ticking.

Once the teething troubles such as lack of enough laptops, ensuring data safety and patchy internet connections at the homes of employees were sorted, the companies found the going smooth with not much dent in productivity. While the pandemic was raging, TCS even announced its 25 by 25 vision - under which only 25% of the workforce would work out of office by the year 2025. However, this year the plan was given a quiet burial.

This eagerness to call back employees triggered an exodus among the women staff at TCS. For the first time, women employees leaving the company outnumbered their male counterparts. The company, however, decided to stick to its return-to-office policy. 

Survey Narratives

Before the pandemic, remote work was looked down upon by most managers. They saw it as the first refuge of slackers and used to sanction it with much reluctance, and most companies had a monthly cap on WFH.

However, the pandemic ensured that WFH was the only way out and skeptics were forced to list out its virtues. Many research organizations came out with surveys stating that remote work had not affected productivity and the work-life balance of the employees had improved. Though some of them claimed that employees were complaining of longer working hours. 

Once the virus was gone for good, the surveys began to sing a different tune. They began to list out the ills, including low productivity, longer turnaround time, employee tendency to procrastinate, and lack of supervision and mentoring of new employees.

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In Memoriam

It has been over a year since my mother passed away. It all began on August 8 last year, when she slipped on a wet floor and got badly hurt at our home in  Kozhikode. I got a call during my morning walk here in Bangalore.

I was dreading and praying it was not a fracture, but no such luck. She was hospitalized and doctors opined that surgery needs to be done as the fracture was a complex one.

This sudden turn of events forced me to rush to Kozhikode. Luckily train tickets were available and I reached the very next day after the fall.

When I reached the Kozhikode District Cooperative hospital she was in deep pain. Initially, she was admitted to the general ward as special ward rooms were not available. The scene there was chaotic with almost all patients with plasters and slings as the ward was meant for patients needing orthopaedic care.

I then went to the Orthopaedics outpatient rooms to meet Dr Reju, who was treating my mother. In terms of appearance, he had a height that would have been ideal for a basketball player. He was a soft-spoken and affable man, probably in his mid-thirties or early forties with a substantial girth.

He said that surgery was the only way out. When I raised my concerns about my mother’s age, she was 80, he said it was still doable and the hospital will ensure that her other health parameters are in check before the surgery. “Don’t worry we will fix this,” he said assuringly.

On his mobile phone, he showed the X-ray print. There were fractures at two points on her left femur bone, along with some minor cracks nearby. He readily offered to share the X-rays with me on WhatsApp and I sent them to a distant relative, who is also an ortho surgeon. He too concurred with what Dr Reju had suggested.

I later dialled up various sources to get a room and don’t know which one worked – she was shifted to a room on the second day. This shift calmed things down a bit, as I didn’t have to witness other patients in a far worse state writhing in agony over the pain caused by road accidents and other much more serious injuries.

For me the daily routine was somewhat like this: Sleep overnight in the hospital; get up to buy breakfast etc for mom and caretaker; leave for home for a bath, shave and breakfast; rush back to the hospital before 10 am to be present during the doctors’ morning rounds; buy medicines; leave for home during lunchtime and return by evening. Luckily my home was a 10-minute walk from the hospital, and I used to walk, except while going for lunch when I preferred an autorickshaw to escape the blazing afternoon sun.

Kerala back then was in the grip of the Covid-19 second wave and daily caseload and test positivity rates were at alarming levels. The fourth floor of the hospital was a designated Covid ward, while my mom was in the fifth.

Ambulances with blaring sirens rushing towards the hospital were a normal occurrence. A couple of times I happened to be near the hospital entrance when they arrived. A flurry of activity follows, healthcare personnel fully covered with white PPT kits and Ku Klux Klan-type hoods used to emerge out of the ambulance, and some from the hospital, also covered from head to toe with PPT kits, would rush to escort the Covid patient to the waiting stretcher or wheelchair.

Almost every onlooker used to dart away from the path and keep a safe distance when the stretcher carrying the patient moved to the lift.

There was an oxygen plant within the hospital premises and it was humming with activity. While getting into the lift I often used to come across hospital employees wheeling the longish oxygen cylinder and getting off at the fourth floor.

The Covid paranoia within the hospital was very strong. Everyone was wearing double masks and I sometimes had trouble trying to make out what those nurses were saying. While the hospital was maintaining safety protocols on most floors, it was lax on the ground floor lobby. It appeared crowded most of the time with people milling around the billing counters, canteen, X-ray room, pharmacies, and outside the consulting rooms of various doctors. 

I sometimes would willingly suffer the toil of taking the stairs to the fifth floor when the crowd waiting at the lift lobby appeared too much for comfort. While taking the stairs, the fear of the virus kept me at arm’s length from the railings!

Hand washes were almost as frequent as looking at phone screens. The clothes I wore at the hospital used to be dunked straight into the washing machine on reaching home. The last thing I wanted was to contract the dreaded virus and pose a risk to others.

On the surgery day, my mother was put into a stretcher around 8 am and wheeled off to the operation theatre. As a bystander, I had to wait outside. Keeping physical distancing in mind, I occupied a seat among the waiting chairs where the next one was vacant. But as the day wore on, the crowd outside the operation theatre swelled and it became impossible to find such seats.

Once the surgery got over the nurse called out my mother’s name. As I approached her, she told me the surgery was successful and told me to bring in her toothbrush and a pair of dresses as she will be spending the day at the post-operative care and may return to the ward the next evening.

After she came back to the ward, she appeared a bit calmer but complained of pain caused by surgical wounds. She was allowed to have semi-solid food by placing the bed on a recliner position.

She seemed to be on road to recovery and doctors during their morning rounds appeared satisfied with the progress. However, Dr Reju used to sometimes chide her for not being active enough, used to tell her to spend time in a recliner position and try to move the affected leg a bit.

A few days later the physio accompanying the doctor began holding her leg and moving it, and she used to shriek in pain. He told us to make her sit in bed and hang her leg a couple of times a day.

As the day of her discharge neared, we made arrangements for a wheelchair and suitable toilet seats for her future requirement. On reaching home, she continued with medicines and other treatments.

Doctors had advised us not to entertain many guests at home, as Covid was rampant in most places. So many of my relatives used to call up to know mom’s condition. In fact, some of them had already fallen prey to the dreaded pandemic and were recovering.

Mom’s condition appeared to be on the mend. She began taking normal food, though in small quantities. As the cot at home was much more low-slung than the hospital bed she found it easier to put her feet down.

It was over three weeks since I came to Kerala and I had some urgent matters to settle in Bangalore. So I had to leave and was planning to return after a few days.

However, fate had different plans. About two days ahead of my scheduled departure for Kerala, I got a call saying her condition had worsened and she has been rushed to hospital. She had a heart attack, the first one in her life.

After having lunch, mom complained of uneasiness, and the doctor couple in the ground floor flat was called. They rushed to attend to my mom and suggested that it requires immediate hospitalisation. The same couple was the first responder when my mother had a fall.  

I managed to get tickets for the 8 pm train, but by 5 pm I got to know that she was no more. After reaching home in Kerala around 8 am, I immediately got ready for the funeral. The crematorium officials had given us a slot before 9 am, as after that they only deal with Covid funerals, which required a much more stringent safety protocol.

After performing a brief ritual, the body was placed on a conveyor belt, which was wheeled into the incinerator chamber of the electric crematorium. As I came out I could see the smoke coming out of the chimney, and the grim realisation that all was over dawned upon me.

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Pandemic Shadow Over Twitter

 

Logging on to Twitter is like a Faustian bargain with time. You hope you can 'timebox' your Twitter time, but nine out of ten times this micro blogging site gnaws into your daily schedule. The tasks listed in the to-do list either are scratched off for another day or done well behind the schedule and in a hurried manner.

However, these days scrolling Twitter posts is heart-wrenching. Newspapers and other publications provide an occasional quote and statistics related to the havoc caused by the second wave of Covid-19. But Twitter on the other hand provides the human side of the tragedy that is unfolding in our homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, crematoria and burial grounds, and often narrated in first person. Those tiny 280-character long posts, sometimes with a photo or video, provide us a glimpse of the scale of tragedy that has befallen our country.

Though the second wave is barely few weeks old, it has dwarfed the first one with a manifold rise in the number of daily new cases and fatalities. It made its presence felt around Feb 15 and took off after March 10. The second wave pandemic graph now loosely resembles a pencil-sketch outline of Dubai's Burj Khalifa tower.

During the peak of the first wave last September, the number of new daily cases were less than one lakh and fatalities rarely crossed 1000. But this time the daily new cases are topping three lakhs and deaths exceed 2,000.

This is also getting reflected on Twitter, with almost every second member either infected or has some close relative battling the virus. The health infrastructure of almost every city is creaking under the heavy influx of patients with the deadly British variant and the triple mutant viruses wreaking havoc across the country.

The Twitter posts can be broadly divided into two categories. Firstly, conscientious members admitting that they have tested positive for the virus and requesting all those who came in contact with them to get tested. Or their spouses and relatives have tested positive and they have gone into self-isolation. They range from random guys to influencers, journalists, stand-up comedians and others with thousands of followers.

The second category makes a much more disturbing reading. Members making fervent pleas for hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like remedesivir or tocilizumab and plasma for themselves or for their next of kin. In some cases, it is from families where all members have been infected and can't step out or for families that have already lost one member and another one is in serious condition. The requests are from everywhere - from cities such as Delhi and Mumbai to smaller towns like Faridabad, Patna, Bhopal or Kanpur.

These messages follow a similar template: It provides details regarding patient's name, age, oxygen level, contact number, hospital and often end with a 'please retweet and amplify' plea. The sheer volume of such posts points to the extent to which our health infrastructure has been overwhelmed.

A few posts do appear of members profusely thanking Good Samaritans and NGOs for timely help in getting a hospital admission or oxygen cylinders. Some volunteers also post 'This is sorted. Hence deleting the tweet' after successfully providing relief to the Covid-19 infected.

But for every such tweet there were numerous others which did not have such happy endings. In some cases, the members tweet that they no longer need any leads on beds or cylinders as their kin passed away. So, it is not exactly the virus, but failure to get oxygen or timely medical help that proved fatal.

The virus has decimated many families, with some losing their aged parents in a matter of few days, or even worse minors becoming orphans. While for others ‘normalcy’ may return after the current Covid-19 wave ebbs in a few months, but for these families the scars will remain for long.

The mounting death toll, officially above 200,000 after the pandemic started last year, is making crematoriums and grave yards work overtime and it is extracting a heavy toll on the grave diggers and crematorium workers. They are also exposed to a greater risk of contracting the virus. There is also a shortage of firewood in many places and some graveyards don’t have any space left to bury the bodies.

For the bereaved families, the duration between death and last rites is getting longer as body bags line up at cremation and burial grounds.

A positive fallout of the unfolding tragedy has been the rise of volunteerism and altruism on Twitter. Common folks are trying to help out each other. And it is no longer confined to supplying oxygen cylinders or medicines. Some are offering meals to Covid patients who are single and not in a position to cook. Others are offering free online consultations and counselling to Covid-affected families. There were also Tweets offering boarding facilities for pets of these families.

The downside is that several fraudsters are also around to make a quick buck from hapless patients. They promise oxygen cylinders, medicines at exorbitant rates and vanish once the advance payment is made. Quite often the drugs they supply is also spurious.

Though Bollywood and cricket stars are treated like Gods in this country, they were totally missing in action. They wield huge influence on Twitter with a large army of followers, but the silence of their handles has been deafening. Barring just one or two, nobody has spoken a word about the unfolding health crisis, probably the biggest since Independence.

In fact, some of the Bollywood stars were clicked by the paparazzi at the Mumbai airport leaving for safer environs of Dubai and Maldives to escape the pandemic. The cricket stars, until recently, were busy playing the Indian Premier League  and enjoying the best-in-class Covid-19 safety and treatment protocols. However, the wily virus has even breached those bio-bubbles and the tournament had to be put on hold. Even some of the retired stars, who still enjoy popularity, appear tone-deaf to the plight of their countrymen.

Lastly, one really wonders how the non-Twitter universe is coping with this calamity. Many reside in small towns and villages where the health infrastructure ranges from patchy to non-existent. For them it may be a much more uphill battle against the deadly pandemic, and their suffering rarely creates a blip in the Indian media's city-centric radars.

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Reporting Sick During Pandemic

 

The Covid-19 pandemic may have disrupted our lives in many ways, but one of the worst-hit is 'reporting sick' for duty.

For many of us this used to be the first resort to bunk office and the most common excuse was fever, followed by splitting headache. The motivation for reporting sick could be many: going for a newly-released movie, shopping, celebrate the win of your favourite football team or to mourn its shock defeat; or something much more serious like attending a job interview of a rival firm.

The managers used to take it with a pinch of salt - while the stricter ones demanded explanation the next day, the more benevolent ones used to accept it with a wink.

Now the pandemic has totally redefined fever, cold, body ache and loss of taste and they are no longer something we can trifle about. While in the pre-Covid days body ache and loss of taste were often used to buttress one's case for reporting sick with a reluctant superior, now it invites alarm and social distancing.

During zoom calls even an accidental sneeze is seen as a major faux pas. The Manager will ask "Are you okay", while other colleagues will give you a very concerned why-don't-you-see-a-doctor look.

Things have now come to such a pass that even a common cold or fever is seen as a big misfortune. You try not to report to anyone and keep everything under the radar. The first stop is self-medication of time-tested tonics and tablets. Hypochondria sets in, and the moment the mercury strays beyond the normal mark, its paracetamol time.

If this proves ineffective, one reluctantly visits the friendly neighbourhood doctor or a hospital. The sight of doctors and other medical personnel in face shields and PPE kits at hospitals looks quite intimidating. If the doctor suspects the worst, a bevy of tests follow. It is one of those rare moments in your life when you pray for a negative outcome of tests.

Meanwhile, the office is kept in the dark. No eagerness to apply for leave this time and all out efforts are made to prevent any signals that your nosy colleagues' or boss' antennae may pick up.

However, this is not to conclude that 'reporting sick' has become totally extinct. They have come down drastically and the excuses have changed - neck or back pain, stomach upset or tooth ache are the new favourites.

 

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