EMPLOYEES CAN WORK IN 2 TO 3 COMPANIES AT THE SAME TIME: A NEW NORMAL FOR THESE COMPANIES TO COME – DETAILS

As the on-going pandemic has changed the atmosphere of work for employees from across the globe, experts suggest that their employees should be allowed to juggle between two or three jobs.

When the lockdown commenced in late March, almost 3.5 million desktops had to be transported within a few days to the homes of people so that the companies could survive in the industry. “I see no reason why, from a Business Process Management industry point of view, up to 50 per cent of people cannot work from home. And it could get even a little deeper,” says the chief executive officer of the WNS Group.

“If anyone had spoken about work from home (shortened since to the recognisable acronym, WFH) as a potential model, we would have laughed in February,” says Murugesh, who stepped down as the chairman of Nasscom earlier this year.

“Revenues have dropped and at some stage you will face a situation where companies will start staring at job losses,” added Murugesh who also has a radical solution to this problem. He calls his solution to be a barter system, “As an industry, we need to come together and say that you need so many people and I have so many people... maybe you can leverage them for four hours and I will leverage them for four hours. And we share the expense among the two or three companies. That is obviously connected to client approvals and issues around confidentiality.”

“But beyond that itself, somebody could work for the IT industry for four hours a day, could work in the hospitality industry for three hours a day, could work for three hours in a different industry… that is the point I am trying to make,” he said. 

Murugesh also stated that the government is listening to a lot of these solutions carefully given the current challenges that are opposing businesses. He believes that people must juggle between a few jobs to make the best out of this pandemic and advices freshers to grab the first job they get. “Grab it because in uncertain times, you must first build credibility; you need to build skill sets, earn experience, and I would say build moral courage and fortitude…because this crisis is not going away in a hurry.”

“These are young people; they are not really interested in long-term savings and are not waiting to collect from their pension fund. There are women working from home who would be very happy to work for four hours a day, five days a week. Or maybe two hours with our industry and two hours with some other industry and keep three days for themselves,” the WNS chief says.