COVID‐19 has been a big disruptor. It's impact on organisations and people across the world has been significant. This impact has been different across industries and far reaching. I outline some of the implications we have seen in the IT Services industry, the responses that organisations pursued and how we see the future challenges and transformations.
Most organisations in the IT Services industry, where Infosys primarily operates, have clients across the world and have their employees working around the globe. Infosys (Revenues in the year FY20 were 12.8 bn USD) employs about 240,000 people across its group companies, spread across 46 countries. On an average, about 30% of the workforce in the industry work overseas. Of the 70% that work in India, most of them are in their early careers, between 1–5 years in their first job. In most cases, they have to come to offices to work because they work on desktops, and the clients for whom they work have strict security policies based on the nature of the work, primarily by physical demarcation of work area as ‘Offshore Development Centres’ with restricted access. As COVID‐19 made its inexorable advance and fears increased, most organisations in the IT Services industry started enabling employees to work from home, which means that for a large number of people at the lower levels of the organisations, we needed to ship desktops to home and enable them with Wi‐Fi adapters, power backup sources (given the erratic power situation in many parts of India) and broadband connections. A large number of employees themselves took their desktops home. As many as 35000 assets were moved to employee residences, enabling about 93% of the employees to productively work from home. Our remote access infrastructure was expanded 10x for virtual private network bandwidth and backend capacity scaled by 4x to support the increase in concurrent connected remote users. Cloud‐based remote audio, video and content collaboration platforms played an integral part to enable virtual working. Clients were spoken to for approvals to move work home from the Offshore Development Centres. About 9,000 trainees and interns were relocated to their homes from our residential Global Education Center in Mysuru, India. They are all enabled to continue training on our digital learning platform ‐ Lex. However, with over 85% of our workforce already enabled for distributed agile working and with over 10,000 scrum masters in the Company, remote development work proved less of a challenge for us.
As they started settling to work from home, the focus shifted to the wellbeing of people and ensuring delivery commitments are met‐ hence managers and the human resources team set up various forms of engagement with employees, learning the basics of ‘virtual engagement’ on the fly. A key insight to this period is about how teams quickly came together in this crisis, regularly collecting information from different parts of the world, looking at government updates, talking to clients and taking key decisions which then needed to be quickly communicated. Some policy and system changes were to be made, to enable people to work from home and access relevant tools. We could see an agile, empowered team working to make things happen, quickly reaching out to others in the organization, cutting across hierarchies, with regular leadership calls keeping everyone aligned.
As the lockdown starts getting lifted, the focus shifted to two key areas in the short term. First was to gradually get people back to work safely‐ which meant working out protocols of a new way of working in offices (right from how they travel to work, the entry points, cafeterias, etc.), and to identify relevant people to come to work given the business need, as well as their personal situation (where they come from, their family, health status etc.). In this phase, there was a need to build confidence and optimism amongst employees, and hence communication became critical. Communication on new workplace hygiene practices, messages from leaders, as well as pictures and videos to provide clarity on actions taken on safety was emphasized. Our ‘InfyMe App’ continued to connect all Infosys employees to the latest updates from advisories, to company policies and other benefits on offer, while allowing them to self‐declare their health status.
Second, this is also a key moment for the management to look at challenges and opportunities in the business in the short to medium term‐ identifying areas for restructuring and cost optimization, including people efficiencies, looking at pockets of new business opportunities and moving resources to those, and enhancing our engagement with our clients. With some impact due to project deferrals and softening of discretionary spends, it was estimated that there will be some margin pressure in the near term. In response to these new contours of projected demand, we are working to optimize our cost structure and operational rigor to ensure execution excellence in our operations. For instance, some of the activities initiated are reducing capital expenditures other than any committed or non‐discretionary expenditures, and accelerating operational cost optimization initiatives such as automation, employee pyramid rationalization, controlling onsite‐offshore ratios, optimizing subcontractor and travel costs, deferring employee compensation revisions and promotions, delaying hiring of new employees. We have not had any lay‐offs and have also committed to honor all job offers we've rolled out.
Creating teams to lead key initiatives in this area and ensuring quick decision making helped to keep things focused on the short‐term initiatives. The ease with which a team works remotely also varies by industry and the culture at the top leadership. IT Services organisations were used to leaders being geographically distributed, and this determined the mindset to remote working and acceptance that productivity would not be an issue.
At the same time, we are also thinking about the future. What would be a future model of hybrid‐remote working, and what do we need to do to enable that? Questions around investment in real estate and the ideal type of offices that could work in the future are being discussed. There are also issues on the managerial and leadership styles that might be more appropriate and suitable for a largely remote working organization. While currently we have teams that worked closely with reasonable physical proximity which moved to working remotely, what would happen if we onboard new employees to a remote team‐ how might that work? Another big question on our minds is about how we reinforce the culture and values of our organization. Physical events and symbols were core to building a culture in the old world, accentuated by leader behaviour and role modelling, that people saw. How could one build a culture in a ‘remote’ environment? Some of the ideas we are working with is a playbook for people to work remotely, setting up a new tool to drive virtual engagement, greater focus on health and wellness, more communication by senior leaders virtually‐ we have even built our own collaboration tool for ‘whiteboarding’ and discussing ideas.
As you can see, this pandemic has created a significant disruption to some of our current ways of thinking about life, business and organisations. We are all grappling with the short‐term challenges of business sustainability and employee wellbeing and productivity, while also thinking about how we work together to transform the organisation for the future. This duality calls for some new insights that can help us plan for what we are now calling the ‘new normal’, and therein are some ideas for future research, which I summarise below.
What would be the best way forward as we approach a new ‘hybrid remote’ working model, where anytime about 40–50% people could be working remotely, and with people overall spending anything between 30–80% of their time working remotely ? What could be the reasons for burnout or loss of productivity for remote workers and how might we plan to manage that? In such a hybrid remote model, what could be the use of physical places, and how could they be designed to meet the new objectives of collaboration and social connection.
How can we build a culture when we have a significant majority working remotely for most of the time? In the virtual world, what kind of symbols and routines would be relevant to signify a unique culture?
What could be the new science of collaboration in this hybrid world? What features do we need in the tools of collaboration that would work best?
What learnings from this unique situation can we synthesise to create agile organisations? How can we increase the speed of response in our organization to external changes in a high‐velocity manner? An added dimension is the possibility of delayering, given that remote working and automation can increase the span of control of managers. We would have to think of new governance systems, that are more in the line of agile updates and discussions, with more empowerment and flexibility for actions, but stronger consequence management for eventual results.
However, to make all this work in the future, some new skills will be important. For leaders, the ability to deal with ambiguity, being agile in decision making, being empathetic while building trust with their teams and working seamlessly across boundaries would be clearly important. For others, the ability to work independently, take greater personal accountability, work collaboratively, network across the organization, and being an infinite learner would be essential. Building these skills and behaviours would be a key task, and organisations would be looking for ideas to accelerate those.
These are some of the directions for future research from the perspective of a practitioner in an emerging market based global organization. I am sure future research will provide some answers and help us navigate the new world. This pandemic is thus helping us discover new muscle in organisations, and also provides us with an opportunity to reflect and transform ourselves for a sustainable future.
Biography
Krishnamurthy Shankar is the Group Head of Human Resources at Infosys. He previously worked at Unilever, Philips and Airtel. He did his masters from XLRI Xavier School of Management, India and his Doctorate in Business Administration from Aston University, UK. He is also the current Honorary President of the National HRD Network in India.