As many organisations already allow the Work From Home (WFH) concept, extending this to a larger portion of their workforce is a great opportunity to test if this concept works, states Girish Nayak, Chief-Customer Service, Technology and Operations, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company
Some edited excerpts from an interview:
From an IT standpoint, what are some of the key initiatives initiated by your organisation in ensuring that business continues as usual?
We at ICICI Lombard are always committed to provide a healthy, safe and flexible working environment for each of our employees and at the same time committed to serving our customers, channel partners and our stakeholders. In view of the current Covid-19 pandemic across the world, we at ICICI Lombard have enabled IT infrastructure that will help most employees work remotely. Employees across locations have been assigned laptops and access to systems over VPN or private cloud that will help them in supporting business. We immediately moved half of our employees to start supporting business from home and ramped it up in accordance with both state and national government directives.
For most of our sales partners including distribution tie-ups, agents, brokers we always had digital platforms for most of their day-to-day work such as quotes, policies and other transactions, they are also able to gather all the information that they need in terms of products, processes and even payments. The technology teams have worked day-and-night to enable the larger workforce to be able to work-from-home and to support our customers and business partners in this moment of crisis. Our various teams continue to help customers in their time of need through phone, email and chat platforms.
What are some of the key challenges faced to ensure a Work from Home Policy?
Any disruption to normal ways of working have its own set of challenges. There will always be barriers to smooth remote working and it is very important that technology is up to the task. A few of the challenges that any organisation will face for implementation of a Work from Home policy include the following:
* Having internet access at home
* Speed of internet access
* Access to applications using VPN or remote server
* Safety and security of personal computers
* Handling of confidential information
What are some of the key lessons learnt during this crisis?
The current situation that the world is facing in terms of the Covid-19 pandemic is very different from other challenges that we have faced in the past. However we hope that this is a temporary situation and we are sure we will come out stronger. If we had to rewind the clock and do a few things differently for us to be better prepared, we would have probably done the following:
1. Put more efforts into enabling the work-from-home infrastructure for the larger workforce both in terms of functionality and security
2. Enabled more applications on the web to be able to access them remotely
3. Enabled more collaboration tools across the organization
What are some of the technology tools used to facilitate smooth collaboration between employees?
We are using Microsoft Teams to ensure smooth collaboration between different employees and various teams as well as various external partners that we work with. It is a very useful platform for keeping communication and information flowing across various sets of people. It is very easy to remain connected through voice and video conferences. It also helps us also in collaborating across different documents – presentations, spreadsheets, visualizations and coding just to name a few.
Do you believe that the current mandatory use of remote work for business continuity is a signal to all organisations that it’s time to revisit their remote working policies and redesign them?
We believe that this is a great opportunity for organisations to test the work-from-home concept. Many organisations already allow this for a large portion of their workforce but this is an opportunity for other organisations, including us, to test if this concept works. I am sure that all organisations will be keeping an eye on the overall productivity of their workforce to make sure this concept works out.
Think of it in the long run, if productivity stays the same or improves, employees will actually spend less time traveling, will have fewer sick days and therefore take less time off, be less distracted and take smaller breaks. Overall, it should also reduce the carbon footprint driven by lesser use of cars. There will still be people who would want to go back to their routine in terms of meeting people in an office and have face-to-face meetings. However in the long run, these new ways of working will hopefully highlight benefits of working from home and might lead to increased flexibility for both organisations and individuals.