With the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, changes in work patterns and working conditions were thrust upon us by the sudden irreparable ordeal.

Here are the few tips Charulata Ravi Kumar, MD, Accenture shares, that has helped her and her families she knows:

-Work from home should be balanced with home life, the work life and the personal life:
As families sit down and find time to spend with each other. Don’t make your days 24 seven work from home. Set load shares with chores at home. Your work from home does not mean that family around you is meant to hover around and feed you and serve you.

-Ensure that you continue the work from office approach of respecting people’s geographical hours and out of office requests:
Think before shooting out mails. It has been seen that people are resorting to 30 to 40% more mails than required since work from home started.

-Secondly, the need for robust working solutions for hybrid workforce, a mix of employees working from home and from office:
This threw up its own challenges like tech infrastructure challenges, most homes didn’t have the required bandwidth or office setup at home privacy was an issue.
Client data protection is critical to maintain no compromises there.
Companies stood by employees to help get them bandwidth and required infrastructure and also helping them cope with flexibility needed for better work life balance.

–Thirdly, we must look at creating an inclusive and diverse workforce and culture:
Whether the new work conditions exists or not, this should be top strategic priority. The inclusion and diversity road-map needs redefining and redesigning.
We need to use the widest possible lens to view inclusion, diversity going beyond gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, religion, abilities, gender expression identities.
We need to set people up for success by providing an empowering environment.

The independence given to the teams is resulting in higher productivity,almost negligible errors, because every single person has become more in ownership of their own roles.

Inclusive leadership training becomes important to ensure elimination of bias, empowering women employees, acquire new skills and technology, leadership management and more career and professional development for women must be at the forefront.
We must bring about this change not because work from home now enables it, but also because it is the right thing to do and to bring the best minds together to make equal opportunities reality and to bring diversity of thinking.

A little bit now on culture and team building, some new dimensions need to be thought through here as well.

If this situation continues,

– how do we continue strong team bonding?
-how do we create an environment rooted in the strong culture of the organisation?

– how do you make it come alive? And how do we keep the culture vibrant and all pervasive?

These will evolve over time.
The best way to be prepared for this new world before us is to become agile and adapt at speed.

-It is very important to keep our fingers on the pulse of changing lifestyles.

-Recognize your stress and the reasons around those:
Sometimes we carry stress without realizing and make it affect the way we go to sleep and the way we wake up and when this begins to happen.
You need to chill take time off to unwind, it’s important to discuss connect from everything and connect with your inner self. It could be a walk without your mobile painting something silence, music or even reading a book.

-Connect with your loved ones:
Notice I said connect and not spend time. Sometimes, we think being around our loved ones is enough, it is not.
Try to indulge in activities together we discover and rediscover each other through shared moments of interests.

-Reach out to your colleagues, family, friends, mentors, help is just a call away.
–Good and timely diet and a smile everyday, that’s all we need to feel the inner happiness and goodness.
–Do not let the unpredictable changes drench you, embrace everything the future brings.
Remember the power is in your hands.
–Don’t forget your mask and wash your hands frequently