Covid 19 is like a MBA simulation of the most complex business challenge: Mukund Nair, Director HR, Nagarro

Building the muscle to support remote working is very important, as what today is business continuity, can soon become a necessity, states Mukund Nair, Director HR, Nagarro, as he outlines his firm’s initiatives in ensuring that business continues as usual

At Nagarro, we had recognized the power of remote working a few years ago and in fact one of our business units “Nagarro Silicon Valley labs” operates completely remotely. We took the decision a year ago, to institute a distributed working certification program throughout Nagarro. As part of this initiative, projects were certified to be able to work with team members spread across different cities and countries seamlessly.

Our push through this certification program was to create the right mindset towards remote working, by communicating extensively the benefits, significantly investing in IT tools that encourage collaboration and communication, as well as by providing the right infrastructure. At Nagarro everyone is issued a laptop, datacards were provided to people who had spotty connections at home, VPN’s had already been set up wherever required and our cloud based solutions ensured that all critical data was accessible in a secure manner irrespective of where our colleagues were.

This certification program and IT tools readiness has ensured that when we were hit by the Corona virus induced limitations, we were seamlessly able to shift to a globally distributed model of working with zero impact on our operations.

Work From Home Challenges

At Nagarro, we have always encouraged work from home wherever possible depending on what the project and client needs are. We feel, instead of trying to force fit a policy across the entire organization, we would rather build the culture of empowerment and discretion, where project leaders and our colleagues can collaboratively decide on when to work from home and when to be physically present.

A contextual and agile mindset towards work from home will any day be more flexible than a centrally mandated non-flexible work from home policy. This doesn’t mean though that work from home doesn’t have it’s challenges. It’s important that project leaders have the right amount of trust and planning in place to ensure goals are being met without micro-management. Similarly, each individual needs to ensure they have the right infrastructure to support work from home requirements and also they can back it up with a conscientious self-driven mindset to ensure productivity is not impacted at all.

Best practices

The challenges raised by the coronavirus situation, have been like a MBA simulation of the most complex business challenge!! These are extremely trying times and some of the things we have discovered are:

Try and stay 2 steps ahead – We had reached out to the entire leadership on 3rd March itself to start the process of work from home for all employees for whom it was immediately possible and for others activate BCP initiation, so that in the next couple of weeks everyone is set up to work from home

Communicate, communicate and communicate – In these times it’s extremely important to transparently and frequently communicate what is it that the organization is doing and set expectations with all colleagues. Don’t limit this communication to just advisories and status only though. Create avenues for collaboration, enjoyment and other such initiatives which help keep the morale high in these difficult times.

Be prepared to adapt and change your decisions – In situations like this almost every day you could have a curveball thrown at you. From travel bans for foreigners to travel bans for Indians, to mandatory WFH and so on. You need to be prepared to react quickly to these changes and in some cases even reverse decisions you took just a day before. Again as long as you react quickly and communicate, communicate and communicate, you will be able to handle it

Be prepared that you will still be unprepared sometimes – Despite whatever plans you might have in place, there just might not be enough time sometimes to react and in some cases no viable solutions. In such cases, don’t let that bog you down. Assess the impact, again communicate it transparently to stakeholders and go back to your plans to see what do you need to tweak to avoid this for the future.

Collaboration Tools used
Our mission statement is “Making distances irrelevant between intelligent people” and hence we have constantly invested in collaboration tools. For collaboration within projects we use Microsoft Teams and Slack extensively. We are also using Yammer to make sure as a company we are keeping our colleagues engaged and informed as well as having fun. For mobile chats, Kaizala is quite popular and for calls or interviews we use Skype too. Also for large scale conference calls we extensively use GotoWebinar and Zoom.

We also have quickly spun up a mini portal which provides advisories and updates around the epidemic and are keeping people up to date on all the steps we are taking to protect Nagarrians through frequent advisories.

Apart from this, projects use the various agile project management tools typically from the Atlassian family to keep all project team members up to date on status of tasks and ensure seamless coordination.

Future

For the type of problems we are facing and will continue to face: virus epidemics, climate change, crazy commute times, high levels of pollution, extreme weather etc., building the muscle to support remote working is very important, as what today is business continuity, can soon become a necessity. How every organization’s experience is, at the end of this mandatory exercise, will go a long way in shaping mindsets which in turn will lead to future process changes.

If done right, remote working can lead to higher productivity, greater retention of employees and most importantly eliminate barriers of distance when it comes to attracting talent. Now that many organizations have been placed in this setup, our view is that for most organizations the pandemic is definitely going to accelerate the process and especially for organizations which primarily employ knowledge workers.