With the pandemic restrictions easing up, the road ahead remains digital. Employees now work from anywhere. The Remote work arrangement is expected to stay for some time or employees will at least have the option of a hybrid work culture - switching between working from office and remote working. While remote work offers flexibility to workers it also adds a layer of complexity to operations.

Paper-based processes, though dwindling, remain essential in any office whether for audit preparations or closing documents. Having a distributed workforce throws a spanner in the works, causing a disconnected employee and customer experience across the entire end-to-end workflow. The path forward for delivering paperless systems is through digital transformation and moving to the cloud. This can enhance the flexibility and scalability of business operations by providing easy access and retrieval of critical data and information, protecting business-critical information and streamlining workflows with the help of integrated tools. They can also help deploy personalised, customised and empathetic end-user experiences quickly and seamlessly in a distributed digital world which is extremely tough to do on a traditional platform.

As organisations look into the future, they must be able to engage the "everywhere talent" and "everywhere customer". It means accessing new and diverse talent pools and converging traditional commerce with ecommerce. It is needless to say that the post-pandemic workspace is going to look diverse. In such a scenario creating a phygital office that connects the physical and digital world will make employees feel safe at work while also enhancing their productivity and the overall business profitability. Through its futuristic digital toolset, the new-age concept aims to emerge as a differentiator by bridging the gap between physical and remote presence.

Looking into 2022, employers have a powerful opportunity to combine the best of remote work and in-office experiences in a way that benefits the organisation, its employees and customers. More and more companies are exploring new organisational structures that will support the weight of their goals and simultaneously address their employee needs. The future of work will see employers leading with empathy and understanding that the future of work is interlinked with the future of the employees.

Some of the challenges around remote work include employee's motivation, effectively driving collaboration and open communication across teams, and ensuring employees personal and professional lives remain balanced. Business leaders should therefore focus on building a strategy to ensure that employees are clear about the organisations as well as their own goals, focusing on an inclusive atmosphere with mental wellness as a key priority.

It is important to ensure employee productivity in the evolving business dynamic Sanjeev Verma SVP - HR, CS, EHS, STT GDC India

Around 20 months ago when things had to shut down overnight, we were faced with the challenge of shifting our work to a complete remote network. More than 60% of our staff form a crucial part of DC Operations management and project function and are required to be present at data centres to allow smooth functioning.

To prevent our employees from burning out, we encourage them to maintain a healthy work life balance and take time off every month to rejuvenate and destress from work. Moreover, we actively launched virtual happy hours to enable informal catch-ups and culture building. We have also renewed focus to provide a tailored employee assistance program to address any professional or personal issues that an employee might face. Physical and mental wellbeing webinars, healthy heart etc organised from time to time.

In order to create an environment that nurtures our people to reach their highest potential, we have many up-skilling and right-skilling programmes available that offer a blend of technical and behavioural learning opportunities. On average, every employee at STT GDC India has been engaged in 32 hours of training over the last one year and the ratio of technical training vs soft skill training was 60:40. In addition to this, we have also created an HR connect program to facilitate a one-on-one conversation to understand the barriers an employee is facing and how HR can help remove those to ensure productivity.

Another key element to empower the future workforce is by creating inclusive teams spread across the country. Having a team of diverse and inclusive members is the most sought after fundamental which results in positive growth for any organization. Therefore, we are witnessing a shift in our policies which further transcends into the company's mission and vision to create a more inclusive spread workforce. We have created robust programmess for mentoring women to transition into their core roles in the data centre and we are proud that we have witnessed a 16% rise in female employees in the last three years. In fact, ours is the only local colocation service provider to have women in operational roles.

Read More : https://www.varindia.com/news/the-newage-workplace---enhancing-employee-and-customer-experience