very beautiful blog post

I must say its an interesting article…Something different than what we usually read…keep writing something like this….

And ofcourse…if people/organization bring intiatives like this..we will soon have a different way of working…

All the Best….

Thanks

Disha (Rekha lanxess coll)

Moreover, it’s an stale topic to be on the cover by a newspaper like BS. I would have expected some other thoughts on this new chapter in the life of Mubmai. For example, how does the new infrastructure affect ‘other’ parts of the society? I’ve read other blogs on this site, and a few are much better (someone wrote about IPL culture…comes to mind..simply that was a ‘good’ one).

I would encourage the author of this blog to read blogs/columns from other US based newspapers like nytimes or wsj, and learn something from them. I know Indians (myself being a proud one as well, although have been living in US for a long time) have better writing skills, and can do much better than many. I just felt this one in particular didn’t ‘cut’ it.

Having said that, it’s a great idea to work home, I’ve done it for many years. However, I feel team needs to meet often to have synergy, a good balance between office and home will certainly go a long way.

It would also help organisation to reduce the high infrastructure cost, is more people are made to work from home. For the individual, it saves time, energy and travel cost as well

Excellent writeup… really innovative ! i do know of some big MNCs who have 1 day assigned each week as “work from home day”. am sure its only a matter of time till it is implemented ‘coz really speaking even a “SEALINK” is proving useless and probably so would a monorail!

All the best Bijoy!
Hope to read more on this soon
Anumita Tripathi (Rekha’s lanxess ex-coll)

Could’nt agree more with you. Have been doing it for over two years now and see no reason why it should not work for a larger part of our workforce. The IT industry has actually been more successful in implementing it, particularly to retain talented women who drop out to start a family. Allowing them to work from home ensures all that talent, training and experience does not go waste.

But a few things need to change in a ‘traditional’ organisation’s mindset

1. Measuring output instead of input
2. Downgrading face value, that somehow comforting feeling of seeing your employees chained to their desks, furiously typing away on their keyboards (even if its on g-talk or twitter)
3. Developing a measure of trust, what if the guy is sleeping his day off to get up in the night and work for just two hours and go back to sleep. Again, just bother about point 1 and this should not matter.
4. “Hmmm, if that guy is working from home, not suffering a commute, snoozing in the afternoon and maybe even cuddling up to his wife, why the hell am I paying him a salary? Should’nt he be paying me for it?”
5. Even managers can work from home. Enough productivity tools exist or can be developed to measure managerial work. So, one can measure how much time, for example, an editor took to clear x number of stories and what was the quality of that output.

And Vishal is right in saying that this works better for people with experience. The newcomers should spend their initial years in an office; the learnings are invaluable and you get to know people, without which work does not happen.

Here’s hoping things change in the next decade or so