An entrepreneur, strategist, and a creative, fact-based thinker, Debprotim Roy is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Canvs. In his role, Debprotim leads a young and growing team at Canvs, providing all aspects of leadership, and in doing so is continually analysing business models, building new processes, and systemising structures to develop a holistic service for his client and partners.
A Bangalore company was recently in the news for giving its employees work from home, but only if they work in front of the camera for 9 hours. While some of us may feel ok with it, and some of us may not, the critical question is, why would the company include such a clause for its employees? The answer is, to keep the productivity up. Crisis or no crisis, corporate giants such as Google, Facebook, Accenture, and many more are all accustomed to remote working and have standard protocols set for the same. While on the other hand, majority of the companies might find it extremely challenging to align the remote working process.
Hard as it is to ignore the current challenges organisations are facing due to COVID- 19. We all can agree that it has allowed us to move to a new mode of work: the challenges of physical presence confined to the office or travelling through mass transportation means has made remote working popular.
The fundamental nature of COVID-19’s impact on human behaviour has naturally affected pretty much every industry en masse. Real Estate, for instance, has taken a radical hit with a combination of a generally slowing economy, coming to a crashing halt thanks to the catalytic influence of the disease’s outbreak. While developers have started to halt the launch of new projects, in the current market and social conditions, they are also adapting to vital protocols that the outbreak of Corona has made the need for.
Developers are resorting to purely digital launches to avoid open houses and are setting up online site visit schedulers through these launches. Agents are finding this climate especially tricky to toe the line between their traditional business practices and common-sense protocols in the current environment. Handshakes are out. Video conferences are in. While prominent modes of communication like phone, email and WhatsApp are critical to this remote mode of sales and servicing, Video Conferencing is generally becoming a go-to method for client sales presentations. A lot of agents meanwhile are having to work out of their homes as well, instead of their sites, which out rules even video conferencing as a method of presentation. In such cases, 3D presentations are super handy which can be viewed remotely from mobile devices or laptops by the customers. VR headsets can also prove helpful, but the lack of setup outside of experience centres is a significant impediment for users.
Impact on Organisations
Organisations have had to very quickly adapt to remote work, and too from home, without the liberty of movement. Remote work has certainly novelties that seem pleasant when you get started, but the challenges become more apparent when you have to do that sustainably.
Productive remote work is heavily dependent on the willingness to work, ability to manage tasks virtually, organisational skills, proactive communication chops, interpersonal skills, among a few other factors. If you do not check most of these boxes, remote work is going to be tough for you. Today most individuals are being forced to work remotely from home and are facing challenges that crop up due to a lack of a super formal construct around work.
Quite some people around the world have perfected the nuances of remote work, and we have to learn from them. Although everyone feels thrown into a situation of social distancing, it is not too hard to forget how much we pined for good personal time and space just a couple of months ago. Remote work allows you to work from anywhere, which is a great middle ground.
These trying times shall make us understand the importance of upholding the spirit of humanity, helping each other during need and perhaps make a paradigm shift in the way we work and allocate our precious time on earth towards work and personal time and space.
Keys to Implement an Effective Remote Working Model
Remote working has worked impeccably for many organisations. On the one hand, they have successfully benefitted from the remote working model, but on the other hand, there are still some firms that are struggling to avail its benefits. Some of the critical steps that should be taken to achieve efficiency in this model are:
- First and foremost, a system in place with set protocols for all
- Easy and free-flowing modes of communication with your team via messaging tools
- Siloed collaboration by allocating individual responsibilities within teams
- Mitigate challenges and provide execution support through proactive communication
- Regular updates and work summary to monitor the efficiency
Your tests for remote recruitment should hence be partially objective and subjective. As conscious beings, we tend to conflate physical separation with mental separation quite naturally. Hence the, “Out of sight, out of mind” adage. Physical separation and mental detachment meet midway in a compromise through constant communication. To sustain relationships at a distance, we consciously try to talk more to each other. When we work remotely, we do precisely that. Communication is the viscera of remote relationships. In that, the frequency of communication is an important aspect. Tying your workspace with products leads to an inundation of notification streams. Staying in sync with people at work leads to constant and continuous communications since to compensate for the lack of face time.
For instance, Canvs, a company that harnesses the design muscle of remote teams while working with major companies across India, can be a great help in this situation. Canvs executes all such one-time and retainer projects using its well-established product pipelines of design, review, and communication tools.
To succeed, organisations must make all efforts must be made to smoothen communication, automate repetitive stuff, accommodate with peers, and adapt to changing circumstances. This trend in work that has been picking recently, Remote working is a massive part of the near future.
More about Debprotim Roy and Canvs
With a hands-on approach to solving problems, Debprotim has numerous credits to his name in developing complex fintech products. As a Physics graduate from IIT-Bombay, he employs his Engineering & Applied Physics knowledge to ensure flawless execution and meet client and partner satisfaction. Debprotim’s profound interest in machine learning, coupled with his deep insight into product design and emerging technologies is a powerful combination poised to take Canvs to greater heights.
Canvs is an online community of over 10,000 designers that offers Design-as-a-service to firms looking to fulfil their product design needs. This solution by Canvs called Canvs Club comprises of a smaller community of managed, vetted, distributed design teams of a variety of skills and domain experience. While providing access to a varied ensemble of skills via virtual teams, Canvs also provides a real touchpoint to companies via product managers leading the teams, who work with the client-side product and development teams on one side, while managing the entire design pipeline from Canvs’ end on the other side.