Need for companies to revisit remote working policies: Saumya Singh Rathore, Co-Founder, WinZO Games

By Saumya Singh Rathore, Co-Founder, WinZO Games

Being a social entertainment business, we are seeing traction more than what we expected. This coming in the time when the team was away, operating remotely, we did face an initial challenge managing a sudden surge. Amid the lockdown, people are marjorly keeping themselves entertained by participating in online games. We at WinZO saw an upsurge of 30% on the tier1 traffic coming on our platform. Our game-plays went 3x during the weekend, we quickly rolled-out content like PUBG, Ludo and Free Fire on our platform, to contribute our best possible to keep people distracted in these unfortunate times.

Being a Tech and Data company, we had great learnings from our last venture, ZO Rooms & Zostel. ZO Rooms & Zostel were operationally very heavy therefore we decided to build WinZO as a lean and agile company. In a tech-product company, one of the critical interactions are the coordinated efforts between the Product and tech team. The communication between departments has been well structured since day one. Hence, we are not facing big challenges on this end.

For task management of the IT team, we have always been using JIRA to follow agile methodology of development. It simply allows one to prioritize work and keeps everyone on the same page. There is huge visibility on the bandwidth of team and progress of projects and sprints against timelines. Everyone is available through Gmail/Whatsapp/Slack etc. as well.

At WinZO, we really believe that effective communication is the key to great execution. This is critical to us because when building a tech product as deep as ours, there is an orchestration of skills going on behind the curtains. While no virtual mode of communication can really replace people huddling together. In unprecedented times like these, when it’s about safety and health, we are going remote- using Slack for seamless internal communication and Zoom/Hangouts for meetings.

Seeing the current mandatory use of remote work for business continuity, it’s become necessary for all the organisations to revisit their remote working policies and redesign them with a border perspective. More important to that, businesses should have the inter-team & intra-team communication well structured and defined.