Our lessons from the Covid 19 crisis: Lenin Koduru, CTO, Abhibus.com

As soon as the fallout from Covid-19 i.e. coronavirus became clear, Abhibhus.com started planning to asses, analyse, formulate and execute our plan to tackle the challenge, states Lenin Koduru, CTO, Abhibus.com

At Abhibus we believe in “Expect the unexpected”. As soon as the fallout from Covid-19 i.e. coronavirus became clear, we started planning to asses, analyse, formulate and execute our plan to tackle the challenge.

Few of the key initiatives taken for our employees, customers and the overall business are:

• Deployed resources for containment – Sanitizers, Masks & social distancing was practiced at the workplace
• Mandatory WFH for all our staff
• Identified mission-critical staff members and provided them support – transportation, masks, sanitizers, and necessary training & awareness
• Issued travel advisory & guidelines for customers who were travelling before the complete lockdown. This was done through multiple automated channels – notifications, SMS, Emails, Social Media, Banners, Customer Support etc
• Identified our key partners & vendors and chalked out a common understanding and program to sustain business
• Undertook a broad meeting between management & staff to convey the plan of action, expectation during the crisis and steps taken to sustain and overcome the crisis.

Key challenges

Few of the challenges which we faced in implementing WFH policy were:
Internet Connectivity – the availability and bandwidth in certain areas where our staff resides is still patchy. We are working to identify alternatives

System Availability – Few of the departments used workstations and desktops for their day to day tasks. We provided them with laptops for remote working. Wherever it was not possible, we have allowed the staff to take the workstations are their home. We facilitated transportation in such cases.

Identifying & laying out communication & collaboration practices for all-remote teams-
In certain teams, we require constant & dedicated communication between multiple levels of staff especially in customer support. Thus identifying these constant, Realtime and dedicated communication channels was a challenge.

Lessons Learnt

The key lesson learnt is to be pragmatic and execute our plans well. The execution has to be like a perfectly conducted fire drill, fo this is a crisis of global scale.

Secondly, we need to try out new protocols for the teams & staff which were traditionally thought should be present physically on order to function well. We need to empower and bring more and more such teams to function equally well in a remote setup.

Thirdly, at times such as these, every customer is anxious and to go that extra mile in reaching out to our customers and assuring them plays out a big role in the impact on business.

Tech Tools used
The tools such as Slack, Trello, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Google office suite and any cloud based productivity software has been very useful in facilitating work from home for employees.However, all these tools need to be used in a well-defined protocol and the guidelines/framework for it has to be laid and that requires an experienced & understanding management at each level of organization.

Future of work
Yes, our perspective on the current mandatory remote working scenario is clear in that we support and empower our teams to be flexible in their working arrangements.  We support our customers 24*7 then why not our employees.

The future of productive team lies in better communication & coordination and that should be achieved in any kind of setup – remote or co-located.We agree, that certain teams & functions require a dedicated & realtime communication channel and traditionally co-location has worked very well for them, however with many great innovations coming up in the area of remote productivity & communication, it is right time to look, test and adapt them by organizations.

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