Work from home - A reality check

With the outbreak of a global pandemic and an unprecedented lockdown in place, a paradigm shift has been witnessed in the job market where WORK FROM HOME is slowly becoming the new norm. The HR heads of major companies feel that this is more like a trial and is likely to continue even when normalcy is restored.

This is certainly indicative of complete automation across diverse fields spanning across a lot of sectors. While cost saving and increased productivity benefit the employers, an intensified work-life balance and the comfort of a home environment are major pluses for the employees.

Having said that, it must be noted that the labour intensive sectors have not benefitted from this shift and are worst hit. But with things likely to move ahead in this direction in the near future, given its suitability and unanimous acceptance , the onus is on the employers to find ways to mitigate such problems and come up with a more flexible approach to introduce the large manual workforce into the system. It is interesting to note that some occupations despite low suitability to work from home may show compliance to the model owing to the recent technological advancements.

Another noteworthy fact is that the WFH model may pave way for a lot of women to come back to the professional field who had to quit work post marriage since organizations weren’t flexible and equipped enough. This opportunity will be an able facilitator as a lot of trained and qualified women will find it easy to take the leap of faith.

From the perspective of employment generation, WFH may prove instrumental in generation of new jobs and with time a lot of new startups will flourish. Beside this, the real estate sector will get a major boost since more and more people would be looking for a living space to work from home. This will facilitate an increased demand for housing as compared to before.

However, one major prerequisite for the model is uninterrupted connectivity and failing to have one will impair the functionality of the model. Hence with the changing times, technological adaptability is the only way forward.