Embracing ‘Work From Home’ Even Before The Age of Corona And How It Helped Us To Grow As A Close-Knit Team

For many modern professionals, working from home is a luxury their companies offer them once in a blue moon. Though it has become common in many parts of the world in recent decades, in India, its acceptance continues to be limited. Working from home remains a new system for many as compared to the traditional work system.

The home office or the officeoffice? From our experience, we can definitely say that the ‘Work From home’ scenario has only turned out to be a boon for us.

At Awsm Digital Innovations, we have adopted remote working ever since the company was established in 2010. As a new-age start-up, it wasn’t a cinch to provide our employees with such liberty at a time when even the large organizations offered it only for special needs.

But in Awsm Innovations, where employees are treated more like family, we gave emphasis to their freedom instead of restricting them with rules and regulations.

However, which environment is more effective: the home office or the office office? From our experience, we can definitely say that the ‘Work From Home’ scenario has only turned out to be a boon for us.

How has it helped us in liberating our employee-centric culture?

Being able to set and customize your work hours to meet the needs of your life is not as easy as pie in a highly competitive world. Though our office is situated in the capital city, Trivandrum, employees can openly decide whether to work remotely or to have a workstation at the office. This allows everyone to choose their preferred way of working, not compelling anyone somehow or another.

Our web developers and content creators are always free to do their coding or writing whenever or wherever it suits them as long as they meet their deadlines. In other words, they can put in their eight hours without starting at the conventional office timing.

How has it benefited us and our employees?

The idea of remote working has helped us in building our relationship with the employees and increasing our productivity. Because they don’t have colleagues just a few feet away, team members found themselves developing the skill of looking for answers on their own and becoming more anxious to find out what they need on their own.

We absolutely believe that this selfless mind of our employees is the biggest achievement we have attained

And in fact, they are willing to work more when they are at home even without anyone asking them to do so. We absolutely believe that this selfless mind of our employees is the biggest achievement we have attained by providing them with their freedom in full swing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to earn 3000 plus customers across the globe.

The way we look at it:

For Awsmites, Satisfaction of the customers is not our only motive, but also the happiness of our employees. From our perspective, working from home allows a person to view his work objectively as part of his existence. It helps to diminish the separation of work-life and home-life. This helps to alleviate work-related stress as most times, it is the lack of knowledge of the nature of work or its importance to a person that is not understood by his/her family.

Similarly, there are many things that might surprise you about what it’s like when you don’t have to go into the office every day. And you are not tied to the home either. That doesn’t mean your only other location will be a café around the corner. You can take care of your job while travelling, enjoying the great scenery, or even listening to a band at a live concert.

How remote working became a necessity overnight due to the coronavirus outbreak?

Now in the wake of the alarming spread of the deadly Covid-19, the working class of our nation have found themselves quarantined and away from their livelihood. Although working remotely is not new to software companies like ours, many companies outside this industry are facing it for the first time.

Small companies – from corporates to educational organizations are struggling to coordinate their work together as the virus outbreak has reached their premises, forcing them to send employees home with outmoded laptops, poor network connectivity, no UPS backups and insufficient knowledge about how to handle software products like Skype, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Flock etc.

However, this has opened up a whole new arena of ‘remote work’ culture in our country that has been unexplored till recently. The current trend of remote working due to the Corona outbreak is giving us more confidence to hire full-time remote resources in our company. Our team is delighted and one of the things we all acknowledge is the freedom to spend time doing the things that are essential to us beyond our jobs.

We have a 15-minute team call every day that everyone participates. That’s when we assure that we are all on the same page about accomplishments from the previous day and goals and challenges for the upcoming week. For the past week, this has been our daily procedure. Of course, there’s plenty of association that happens outside of that daily call, but that’s our only prefixed meeting. Apart from that, our team works when and where they want to.

For anyone who is new to the ‘remote working’ concept, we recommend this article by wpandup.org where they shared some tips and best practices to help you to get started easily.

We hope that our personal experiences help you gain more confidence to practice remote working, especially in a time like this where staying at home is the only thing you can do to prevent the virus attack. Once again, working from home is awesome! ?