"Work from Home is no more looked-down upon!"

It’s all began 3 years ago, when we developed a Pan India Network for providing services support to all our clients. We were facing a language problem. We had many clients and service partners in southern India, and lo behold, when they talked, we could not understand the accent and what we spoke, they could not understand us completely. With due respect to all parts of the country, I am sure this problem has occurred everywhere. While we were strug- gling to solve this, the thought crossed our minds: why not hire a few resources at Mumbai who know the local languages of our customers. Then we thought about hiring a resource in Southern India itself. That felt better. But where would they work from? The obvious answer was Home!

Finally the decision was taken: we wanted a local resource who could work from home. But there were also things to consider: trust, data security and business systems. To solve this problem, we started building the systems itself and after many trial-and-error, we were able to develop a solution. And it worked beautifully! It is now known as Ant My ERP, and it is my flagship solution. We hired 3 resources at local levels at Chennai , Bengaluru and Lucknow. After a few teething issues (the usual), we were able to take care of the local clients in a more positive way. This experience of ours laid the base for work from home.

We hired a Happy Caller from the Small Town and Village to manage our service calls quality and it also worked. We were happy that we have created employment.

As luck would have it, a fire broke out in our office at the start of 2019. And we were all forced to work from home till things got back to normal. That time frame where we were forced to work outside the office then laid the foundation for work from home in a complete manner. We never wanted our clients to know about the fire. Instructions were given to the team to manage as if it was business as usual. We all worked for more than 2 months from home. And after 2 months, we switched off our office. It is now nearly a year and we haven’t had a single challenge. Every employee feels fresh when they speak to clients. We meet often at coffee shops to maintain the human touch. Especially in Mumbai, the 15 of us who once used to spend time at office are now spending more time with family, yet their productivity levels for business has doubled. As a new strategy, we have now started pushing team mem- bers whose families are not in Mumbai, to relocate to their native place and stay with their family. And still contribute to the company. And a lot of our employees have jumped at that idea.

So what changed? Here is my deep analysis of a year of executing Work from Home

Benefits of Work from Home:

Arvind Didwania
Founder – Ant My ERP