Work from home, No problem as IBM India is doing it almost 100 pc

Scaling its infrastructure to meet the high demand for online traffic and enabling employees to be highly productive has helped IBM India make a successful transition to work from home, a top company executive said on Thursday.

The 21-day lockdown due to COVID-19 has forced many organisations to adopt the work from home culture.

"Our IT, HR, Business Units, Crisis Management, Legal, Government Relations, CSR, Operations and Security teams have quickly come together to make WFH a reality for over 99 per cent of IBM India employees," Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India Pvt Ltd and General Manager IBM India/South Asia wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The remaining less than 1 per cent of employees at IBM India are focused on mission critical assignments and we are taking every possible precaution to ensure their safety, he said.

"As IBMers, we have always embraced the values of trust and personal responsibility, so the concept of having our employees work from home as the need arises has been at the very core of how we operate as a company," Patel added.

"What has been different in the past few months is embracing this approach at scale, not just among our sizable employee population in India, but around the world."

He said that the successful transition required the company to solve two major challenges.

"...the first is around scaling our infrastructure to meet the high demand for online traffic, and the second, which involved enabling our employees to be highly productive in the new distributed way of working," he said.

As a provider of Cloud computing solutions for clients, IBM had an advantage in terms of meeting the first challenge.

"The second challenge relates more to organisational culture and whether you have the practices in place to facilitate virtual collaboration and enable rapid decision making.

"This isn't simply having video conferencing -- it's about whether employees understand how to work remotely as a team, how to access business critical information, and the ability to embrace agile work practices in virtual workplace," Patel said.