In this episode, Sujata Deshmukh, Founder of Tutul Consulting talks to Kartik Mandaville, CEO of Springworks and Prerona Das, marketing intern at Springworks on how organizations across industries have dealt with the new normal way of work and maintained their effectiveness at the same time.
They also discussed how advanced technologies such as virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are disrupting the workplaces and how various organizations are trying to adopt it in some interesting ways.
Sujata has about 23 years of experience as an HR Practitioner & Consultant. She advises, coaches and co-creates powerful transformation strategies at individual, team and organizational level. Her areas of expertise include Top Team Effectiveness, Leadership Development & shaping Culture.
She is a TedX speaker and has worked with more than 1000s of leaders worldwide and possesses a powerhouse of knowledge when it comes to building an organization effectively. She has a Post Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations at XLRI Jamshedpur.
Organizations have dealt with the new normal by maintaining their effectiveness
Sujata throws light on two very interesting but opposite trends that she observed. On one hand, a few organizations have made a lot of efforts to become more sensitive and inclusive towards their employees. They try to connect and converse with them. Many organizations have modified their policies to include wellness factors as well. These are the organizations which have gone out of their way for their employees.
On the other hand, some organizations are facing major issues of rude behavior by the managers and non inclusive behavior. This results in employees struggling in the creative and intuitive aspects of working. In these cases, managing work and getting space, especially in cities where we don’t have dedicated workspaces, has become difficult.
The whole situation forced people to look at what is important. It has forced leaders to be far more inclusive, caring and sensitive, allowing for flexibility. It’s got leaders to change the way they have done business.
By and large, the overall outcome has been positive. But there have also been cases where employees have been struggling with lack of personal time, or just attending meetings and working for 12 hours a day.
Different organizations dealing differently with the new normal
The smart organizations have had crisper meetings, shorter meetings times where there will be no calls and meetings and making sure the outputs are far more structured. So for those managers who are very structured and used to being very top down, they are able to control it well.
But for those who need to talk and discuss physically, they’ve struggled a bit. So by and large, most of us have adapted to this new way of working. But a few blind spots still exist. And employees just deal with it passively by saying “well, I’ll just go off video and take a break”.
White collar people are leveraging flexible timings, whereas life hasn’t changed for factory people
People who work in a corporate culture have one or two days of flexibility in terms of staying at home or coming to the office. Maybe some flexible timings as well.
But that is only limited to white collar people. The pandemic did not change the work pattern of factory workers or people who work in hospitality, hotels or healthcare industries.
People have the flexibility to continue working from their hometowns.
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Kartik Mandaville