Sheshgiri Kamath co-founded Adjetter in 2011 along with Vikas Garg and Pearl Tewari. This startup transformed into Kapture CRM in 2014. Prior to that, he was involved with via.com in a global role across india and south east asia and had stints with ITC and Manipal group. A commercial pilot by education, Football happens to be his big passion after sales. He believes that his recent role as a father to a 10 month old boy has brought a lot of interesting perspective to his entrepreneurial mindset, especially after 8 years into the journey.
When the pandemic hit, no one was prepared for a remote-first work schedule. Businesses embraced the new normal and took innovative measures to adapt to a new work culture and shifted their entire infrastructure to a work-from-home setting. It definitely took some time to adapt to the ‘new’ work culture but with time, we have come to settle in the new routine.
At first, it seemed difficult to create a WFH culture that functioned as a seamless in-premise working environment since people are usually used to resolving queries by talking to each other and the WFH environment did not provide them the opportunity to converse face-to-face.
However, after a year of working from home, businesses including Kapture saw a significant increase in productivity, flexibility, improved communication amongst teams, and much more.
The work from home culture clearly offered multiple benefits to both – businesses and employees and it was possible due to our technological advancement. Businesses were able to provide and create the same work environment in terms of infrastructure, communication, and work culture.
The Adoption of Tech for Internal Teams
Technology today, is deeply embedded in our everyday lives and has always been at the forefront of digital transformation. Further, an increasing number of businesses are harnessing the power of it.
In 2021, multiple businesses including and specifically the customer centric organizations realized the importance of an Omni channel support for both customers and their employees.
If your agents today have a faulty laptop/battery/mouse, they can easily raise a ticket from their phones or systems. The system should be powerful enough to understand who is sending the query and to which department should it be allotted. This is where technology comes into the picture. It not only allows you to identify everything but also provides quick solutions, right from the comfort of your home.
It is not as easy as visiting the IT department and getting it fixed instantly but it doesn’t minimize the effectiveness of it, either.
Multiple tools have successfully emerged to ease and support teams so they easily manage their work from home. Whether it’s a team collaboration tool, organizing online meetings, raising internal tickets, software for closer collaboration, etc. these are some of the effective tools that are here to stay.
How Remote Work is changing
Remote Work is no longer an exclusive endeavor. Technology and a high speed Wi-Fi connection has made work from home or rather work from anywhere, a more viable option. People today are seen pursuing remote work from say, a coffee shop, travel destination, co-working spaces, home-cum-office (hybrid work model).
As mentioned above, while some employees are working from home, others have taken this as an opportunity to travel and work. Whether solo or in a team, this new found flexibility of remote working has enriched the work teams to bond more. While everyone is working from different locations, important tools like the ‘offline mode’ have benefited employees, which enables them to upload, edit documents even without an active connection.
Future of Remote Work
AI has always been around and shall play a crucial role in facilitating remote work.
A survey by Buffer stated “99% of the employees would like to work from home permanently.”
This is how effective remote work is proving to be. Technological advancements might put the organizations at ease, however, managing long-term work from home can seem a little daunting at first, but with the right tools and tech, it can be a seamless process.
In fact, a significant chunk of employees believe that the remote work environment has dearly helped them attain a decent Work-Life-Balance which was not possible otherwise and something that they had been struggling with.
Conclusion
With COVID having a massive impact on humanity, the prediction of the unforeseen – pandemics, natural disasters, global crises has become very difficult. But over the last 2 years, we have witnessed a common boon – Technology, which has perpetually kept us connected throughout and is also seen shaping and assisting every facet of business and organization to function without hassles.
Prior to the pandemic, the conventional work from office culture was one of the most productive places to engage with customers and provide support to both the customers and teammates. The pandemic changed it, but the operations remained the same because of technical advancements and innovative measures.
With the world gradually returning to normalcy and offices being reopened, transitioning back into a physical setting might pose a challenge for some.