Work from HOME

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It all began 3 years ago when we developed a Pan India Network for providing services and support to all our clients. We were facing a language problem. We had many clients and service partners in southern India, and lo behold, when they talked, we could not understand the accent and what we spoke, they could not understand us completely. With due respect to all parts of the country, I am sure this problem has occurred everywhere. While we were struggling to solve this, the thought crossed our minds: why not hire a few resources in Mumbai who knows the local languages of our customers? Then we thought about hiring a resource in Southern India itself. That felt better. But where would they work from? The obvious answer was Home!

 

Finally, the decision was taken: we wanted a local resource who could work from home. But there were also things to consider: trust, data security, and business systems. To solve this problem, we started building the systems and after many trial-and-error, we were able to develop a solution. And it worked beautifully! It is now known as AntMyERP, and it is a flagship solution. We hired 3 resources at local levels at Chennai, Bengaluru, and Lucknow. After a few teething issues (the usual), we were able to take care of the local clients in a more positive way. This experience of ours laid the base for working from home.

We hired a Happy Caller from the Small Town and Village to manage our service calls quality and it also worked. We were happy that we have created employment. As luck would have it, a fire broke out in our office at the start of 2019. And we were all forced to work from home till things got back to normal. That time frame where we were forced to work outside the office then laid the foundation for completely working from home. We never wanted our clients to know about the fire. Instructions were given to the team to manage as if it was business as usual. We all worked for more than 2 months from home. And after 2 months, we switched off our office. It is now nearly a year and we haven’t had a single challenge. Every employee feels fresh when they speak to clients. We meet often at coffee shops to maintain the human touch. Especially in Mumbai, the 15 of us who once used to spend time at the office are now spending more time with family, yet our productivity levels for business have doubled. As a new strategy, we have now started pushing team members whose families are not in Mumbai, to relocate to their native place and stay with their families. And still, contribute to the company. And a lot of our employees have jumped at that idea.

So what changed? Here is my deep analysis of a year of executing Work from Home

Benefits of Work from Home:

For Employees

Less time spent commuting.

Increased productivity.

Making better use of technology

Higher Morale

Higher Happiness Index

Increase in employee loyalty.

Less wasting of time on useless meetings.

More Time with Family

Employees don’t constantly feel the need for a vacation.

Employees from other companies are now jealous.

For Employers

Improved employee retention.

Access to a wider pool of applicants

More autonomous employees

Lower costs of acquisition

Can hire the best, no matter where they are.

Less wasting time on useless meetings.

Employees take fewer sick days.

Good resultant PR

Employees work longer on a day-to-day basis.

Reduced overheads like Salary

More is yet to come!