For me, to my dismay, a government directive for a lockdown of 21 days, in lieu of the spread of life threat successfully created by Covid 19, was turning out to be a lifetime nightmare. With the pace that Covid 19 was giving a warm hug to everyone whoever crosses its path, a thought was rolling inside the mind – how in HR will we be able to ensure the continuity of business to its maximum? We need to run the show at our best and then we come to know that all of us, for the sake of humankind, have to Work From Home. Oh my God! It’s ok to work from home on one hand, but how do we actually do it practically? All my physical assets (system, files, documents) were at the office. How am I going to ensure the continuity? Then, we got a little peace of mind when our IT team helped us access our e-mail through Webmails. Phew! At least I can access my emails and can give a head start. The other part of me suddenly gave a knock in my head and said, hey you have to Work For Home!! Oh really, how could I even think to escape from this responsibility (major focused objective) when you are at home? You have to do household chores, take care of kids running in the age of 7 and 1.5 years (major attention seeker).
Now, there I tripped to understand that both Work From Home and Work For Home (Yes, Its WFH) have already collaborated so tenaciously that I have to get myself divided in two parts. I ensured that major household chores get completed before 9.30am (my punch-in time), I take a break at 11.00am (my official tea break) when I look after my little one and after half an hour, again resume to my laptop till 2.00pm (I usually have my lunch at this time). At 3.30pm (my official tea break) I do my other household chores while handling the tantrums of my little kids. Meanwhile, when kids are taking their afternoon nap, this time I usually do the planning part, as this needs much focus and concentration (while kids are sleeping) and stretch it till the evening to the best possible manner.
Within this entire routine, I realised that some tasks can be completed with the help of phone calls. But when you have to refer to your previous mails, which is not possible through Webmail, you have to be dependent on your team to share the reference mails, if any. While planning the interviews, considering the availability of both candidate and panel through Cloud VC, when you are experiencing too much surge and network congestion, coordinating with other teams to get information, which is critical to the business, and suddenly there is a network failure and you have to wait for it to revive, a change in weather, which is very much unlikely to happen at this time of year, feels like a sprinkling of salt over the wounds.
But among all these challenges, the spirit of maintaining the business continuity, never let me loose the hope, rather it charged me twice. Yes, it is really difficult to work with very limited resources and in a controlled environment but the can-do attitude enabled me to overcome the limitations as best as possible. The bond with the team has grown much more, leading towards stronger team building, and the level of interaction with each other has risen much more. Altogether, the essence that can be felt much more now is, everybody is working in a single pursuit of goal – Secure @ Work From Home.