First published in ET Government on March 18, 2020
https://government.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/policy-interventions-for-ushering-the-future-of-work/74684063
Covid-19, popularly referred to as novel Coronavirus, is having deep unintended impact on changing how we live and how we work. Concepts of “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” have quickly become part of lingua franca as well as influencing how we are reorganizing work, albeit with the view that this is going to be a temporary arrangement. This has led to “WFH” or Work from Home coming back in fashion with a vengeance, after the epic dalliance with the concept by companies ranging from HP to Yahoo, with Yahoo famously abandoning the WFH concept in 2013, in a bombshell announcement by their then CEO, Marissa Mayer.
However, WFH has clearly come of age, with high bandwidth communication infrastructure becoming ubiquitous and affordable. Most homes of white collared workers in the metros have sufficient broadband to support acceptable quality on-demand video-conferencing on regular general-purpose laptops, PC’s and smartphones. WFH has tremendous potential to reduce traffic, thus significantly reducing air pollution and in general, improving work-life balance by cutting down on travel. It would therefore, also contribute to increasing national productivity by using the commute time more productively. In fact, in the age-old adage that there is a competition between communication and transportation, we could almost say that communication is winning, as it would substantially reduce work-related transportation. This is only going to become even more true, with the impending rollout of 5G connectivity.
However, for this change to make a permanent impact and not be ephemeral, there are substantial regulatory and policy issues that would need to be aligned. To begin with, one has to define liabilities more aggressively. What if there is a broadband outage at a tech worker’s home, that leads to failure of a mission critical system that was being monitored by the tech worker, that in turn leads to massive losses or death? Who would bear the liability of such an event? Or for even simpler cases where an organization ends up losing a deal because a key senior executive could not participate in a video conferencing due to broadband outage? What should be the Service Level Agreements and what should be the regulatory framework that would enable assurance to organizations whose key workers move to a WFH regime?
How does an organization manage confidentiality clauses and data protection clauses when the data is reaching to workers who are working from outside the premises of the company? There are of course security tools to ensure that the data cannot be taken away from the company issued laptops and devices, but what if the data is simply taken as pictures from the screen of the laptop and then an OCR is run on top of such pictures? How does an organization ensure that its employees are adhering to the contracts that the organization has signed up to. What would be the safe harbor provisions that an organization can enjoy under such situations where the employee, outside the premises of the organization, indulges in data related malpractices?
This would also imply that many of the existing contracts with customers and clients would need to undergo significant changes, especially on the data related clauses, where data would need to travel outside the office premises, to the homes of designated workers, if we need to transition to a WFH economy.
Both organizations and government would need to roll out incentives to support WFH, which not only saves precious dollars for the organization by reducing office real estate requirements, but also reduces national costs by increasing the use of existing assets (worker’s home), while reducing usage of precious imported petroleum. Hence, new frameworks need to be evolved where organizations compensate the worker for working from home and for additional expenses at home such as electricity usage, telecom usage, office supplies etc. It should be ensured that such compensation does not attract any kind of taxes, direct or indirect. It would also imply, that definition of residential zones would need to be fine-tuned to ensure that such work practices are not construed to be in violation of the local government’s zoning regulations.
WFH would lead to creation of new types of local industries that support WFH, such as services for local high-speed printers, local meeting rooms, services for delivering samples/ printouts from one WFH worker to another WFH worker etc. HR departments would need to evolve to manage the complexities arising out of such WFH practices. For example, how would HR notice abuse of power by managers? How would client interactions happen?
We have indeed been rapidly pushed into a bold new world by the advent of the unwelcome pandemic. We would need to now quickly work out the mechanisms to make this regime work in a much more stable and sustainable manner and the government regulatory framework and policies would either make India a leader in WFH or would leave the country gasping to catch up with the rest of the world.
https://government.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/policy-interventions-for-ushering-the-future-of-work/74684063
Covid-19, popularly referred to as novel Coronavirus, is having deep unintended impact on changing how we live and how we work. Concepts of “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” have quickly become part of lingua franca as well as influencing how we are reorganizing work, albeit with the view that this is going to be a temporary arrangement. This has led to “WFH” or Work from Home coming back in fashion with a vengeance, after the epic dalliance with the concept by companies ranging from HP to Yahoo, with Yahoo famously abandoning the WFH concept in 2013, in a bombshell announcement by their then CEO, Marissa Mayer.
However, WFH has clearly come of age, with high bandwidth communication infrastructure becoming ubiquitous and affordable. Most homes of white collared workers in the metros have sufficient broadband to support acceptable quality on-demand video-conferencing on regular general-purpose laptops, PC’s and smartphones. WFH has tremendous potential to reduce traffic, thus significantly reducing air pollution and in general, improving work-life balance by cutting down on travel. It would therefore, also contribute to increasing national productivity by using the commute time more productively. In fact, in the age-old adage that there is a competition between communication and transportation, we could almost say that communication is winning, as it would substantially reduce work-related transportation. This is only going to become even more true, with the impending rollout of 5G connectivity.
However, for this change to make a permanent impact and not be ephemeral, there are substantial regulatory and policy issues that would need to be aligned. To begin with, one has to define liabilities more aggressively. What if there is a broadband outage at a tech worker’s home, that leads to failure of a mission critical system that was being monitored by the tech worker, that in turn leads to massive losses or death? Who would bear the liability of such an event? Or for even simpler cases where an organization ends up losing a deal because a key senior executive could not participate in a video conferencing due to broadband outage? What should be the Service Level Agreements and what should be the regulatory framework that would enable assurance to organizations whose key workers move to a WFH regime?
How does an organization manage confidentiality clauses and data protection clauses when the data is reaching to workers who are working from outside the premises of the company? There are of course security tools to ensure that the data cannot be taken away from the company issued laptops and devices, but what if the data is simply taken as pictures from the screen of the laptop and then an OCR is run on top of such pictures? How does an organization ensure that its employees are adhering to the contracts that the organization has signed up to. What would be the safe harbor provisions that an organization can enjoy under such situations where the employee, outside the premises of the organization, indulges in data related malpractices?
This would also imply that many of the existing contracts with customers and clients would need to undergo significant changes, especially on the data related clauses, where data would need to travel outside the office premises, to the homes of designated workers, if we need to transition to a WFH economy.
Both organizations and government would need to roll out incentives to support WFH, which not only saves precious dollars for the organization by reducing office real estate requirements, but also reduces national costs by increasing the use of existing assets (worker’s home), while reducing usage of precious imported petroleum. Hence, new frameworks need to be evolved where organizations compensate the worker for working from home and for additional expenses at home such as electricity usage, telecom usage, office supplies etc. It should be ensured that such compensation does not attract any kind of taxes, direct or indirect. It would also imply, that definition of residential zones would need to be fine-tuned to ensure that such work practices are not construed to be in violation of the local government’s zoning regulations.
WFH would lead to creation of new types of local industries that support WFH, such as services for local high-speed printers, local meeting rooms, services for delivering samples/ printouts from one WFH worker to another WFH worker etc. HR departments would need to evolve to manage the complexities arising out of such WFH practices. For example, how would HR notice abuse of power by managers? How would client interactions happen?
We have indeed been rapidly pushed into a bold new world by the advent of the unwelcome pandemic. We would need to now quickly work out the mechanisms to make this regime work in a much more stable and sustainable manner and the government regulatory framework and policies would either make India a leader in WFH or would leave the country gasping to catch up with the rest of the world.
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