Continuous engagement with employees keeps motivated

Avneesh Vats
Head-IT, Convergence Energy Services 

Remote work – Key trends & challenges
Despite the flexibility of remote working, some industries are still working from the office, while implementing variations. This is not only helping in business continuity but also preventing spread of COVID-19.

A major aspect of remote working is to provide collaboration tools. We have adopted some measures like setting up virtual private network (VPN) secured applications including shared folders, email, and e-Office, a digital solution to access and exchange of documents, and SAP, along with other office collaboration and meeting tools like Microsoft Teams.

Delivering paperless systems
Digital has become a way of working now. It is treated differently across sectors and industries. Every organization seeks to transform using various digital technologies. There is a need for every organization to not only embrace technology, but to position themselves and harness it as a tool to aid their strategic transformation.

Strategies for business profitability
We believe in continuous engagement with our employees that keeps us motivated. Here, managers play a very important role to mentor the team and ensure their professional growth. We conduct regular team meetings virtually to discuss the ongoing tasks and support each other as required.
We are organizing regular open houses for a free flow discussion between the management and employees. These discussions help in bringing unique ideas to boost productivity. We also have workplace training sessions, which have become an active part of our professional life and resulted in a great way for employee engagement. In addition, we have a dedicated training and development centre (EKC) for various training sessions. We are in the process of adopting a cloud-based Learning Management System (LMS) to help employees in self-learning and other training. The programme runs on need analysis of a particular employee, which allows them to focus on specific learning-based tasks.

Future of work and workforce
Moving to remote working comes with challenges too. We have observed that cyber security has emerged as one of the biggest threats for remote working. Organisations will need to look at digital innovation across the dimensions of people, process, data, and technology. Companies should have an existing data protection policy and a robust IT system with the necessary safeguards, including anti-virus protection and secured VPN & firewalls against cyber threats installed on the devices. This will restrict sharing of information through social media or any other platform.