COVID-19 — Introducing the New-Normal of Company Operations

Work From Home policy (referred to as WFH here onwards) has always been an integral part of McKinley’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP). The policy ensures that working from home is beneficial to both, our employees and the company. However, in light of the unprecedented nation-wide lockdown caused due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the policy required major amendments to ensure that the company is prepared to adapt to the New Normal way of working.

Up until the pandemic, our WFH policy was designed keeping in mind that our employees might sometimes prefer working from home due to several reasons, some of which are mentioned below-

a) Parenting

b) Bad weather

c) Emergencies

d) Medical Reasons

e) Work-Life balance

The company’s WFH policy applied to all our employees who had completed their probation periods. There were, in fact, stipulated clauses that could have led to the refusal of the grant of WFH permissions most of them, as expected, related to project management and delivery schedules, such as-

a) In case of a pre-scheduled company event for which the employee is a part of.

b) In case a meeting is scheduled with the management, client or any external stakeholder which is important to effectively run the business.

c) In case a DEFCON is raised for the project the employee is working on it.

However, nothing on earth could have predicted that come March 2020, and a teeny-tiny virus would cripple the economy of the world and would leave a scathing impact on the once-fastest growing economy -INDIA. We weren’t prepared either, however, we acted briskly.

A week before the nationwide-lockdown, the Human Resource Managers, the Project Managers, the Technology Leads and the COO came together to analyze and re-develop the WFH policy to minimize the disruption caused to our systems and team productivity due to COVID-19. Several major decisions were taken, general WFH guidelines were nullified and a WFH charter was developed.

WFH Charter to be followed during COVID-19

a) All Account Officers (usually referred to as the project leads) were mandated to carry out the Start of Day Meetings (SOD) with their fellow team members (referred to as Engineers hereafter) first thing in the morning.

b) All AOs were mandated to carry out the End of Day Meetings (EOD) with their fellow engineers at the close of the day.

c) The SOD meeting would happen project-wise. The AOs in this meeting would need to review the previous day’s work and chalk out a plan for the current day’s work. The EOD review would be slightly longer and would entail a full review of the tasks completed by the Development Team during the day.

d) The SOD and EOD meetings would be attended by the Project Manager (PM) and the Technology Lead (TLs) as well to enable adequate project discussion, query resolution and efficient project planning.

e) A ‘Meetings Calendar’ was uploaded by the PM to keep a record of all essential and Ad-Hoc meetings to be conducted within the team.

f) Meeting guidelines were framed to allow individual team members to work from home to be made available for the meeting. A 1-hour notice was made mandatory before an ad-hoc meeting is conducted. To ensure that time is not spent on unproductive meetings, sharing the meeting agenda an hour before the start of the meeting was made mandatory as well.

Platforms

a) Google Hangouts was chosen as the platform of choice to conduct these virtual meetings.

b) The client meetings were required to be recorded by the AO/PM and uploaded to Google Drive. The link to the recording needed to be attached in the Minutes of the Meeting (MOM).

Communications

a) The PM was authorized to maintain MOM for all meetings except for the daily EOD review. In case of the absence of the PM, the MOMs were needed to be maintained by the AO.

b) All communication needed to happen on the particular project’s Slack channel.

Policy Updates

a) FlexTime was put on hold during the ‘Work from Home’ mode. All employees were asked to follow a 10 AM to 7 PM schedule.

Action Items

a) Employees using the company’s hardware were asked to sign the Hardware Allocation Form and submit it to the HR before the beginning of the lockdown.

With all these measures taken, the first 2-weeks under the lockdown have been more or less satisfactory. Systems were improvised over this course to ensure better compliance and more efficient project management. With no signs of COVID-19 abating, more would be required in the days to come to further strengthen the work culture and the company culture on the whole. Companies would be forced to plan alternates to real physical contact. Alas, hopefully, we would come out stronger than ever in this New-Normal way of working.