On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. After the successful call of Janta Curfew by 1.3 billion Indian people, the Indian government announced a complete lockdown of the entire country for 21 days in an unprecedented measure to halt the spread of coronavirus.
Read on to learn how QuickFMS is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We Supported the Janta Curfew
The Janta Curfew, on March 22, 2020, was a 14 hours (7 AM to 9 PM) self-imposed curfew by the citizens of India to reduce the community spread of the coronavirus. Everyone except people of essential services such as medical services, police, media, fire-fighters, home delivery professionals participated in the curfew. All citizens stood in their balconies and doorways and clapped their hands in support and appreciation of these professionals delivering essential services.
We Moved Our Staff to WFH
The lockdown was the beginning of the long-term battle against the coronavirus outbreak. However, we at QuickFMS didn’t wait for the official announcement of lockdown, which came on March 24, 2020. Instead, we implemented WFH before that, and on March 20, 2020, we made arrangements to help our employees work from home and stop all work from the office.
Why Is Work From Home Necessary?
The spread of COVID–19 can have a severe impact on our ability to manage the business. With the uncertainty surrounding the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, it’s critical that we adopt mass social distancing and self-quarantine to contain the spread of infection. Working from home instead of working at the office allows you to avoid a larger crowd or crowded space. Every staff can help slow down the rate of infection by working from home.
Will Work From Home Impact Productivity?
Remote work is advised by the CDC, and it’s one of the policies that the majority of organizations are implementing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this situation, QuickFMS has re-oriented its work processes; given the need to maintain social distancing while ensuring business continuity, we have made it compulsory for all our staff to work from home.
While work from home has several positive aspects, you get to spend more time with your family while working from the comfort of your home and can take better care of your family members without hampering work. However, the lack of network infrastructure, operational hurdles, and productivity tools are key impediments to work from home, although we can effectively resolve it through management skills.
In order to make working from home easy, we have prioritized communication and asked our employees to participate in non-work-related video hangouts with their team. The economic fallout is unavoidable. But the social distancing measures seem to have worked well for countries worst affected by the novel coronavirus, so all efforts should be made to implement social distancing and keeping employees/people healthy.
We hope this emergency situation will be of short duration, and we will successfully come out of this crisis together and resume our work in the office.
Amit Prasad is the founder and managing director of SatNav Technologies and has business interests in a wide range of IT products. SatNav Technologies is an IT products company focusing on cloud based map data products and a pioneer in GPS, FMS & LBS Technologies. The product suite includes SatTracx in-the-field location based solutions and A-mantra in-the-office facilities management solutions. QuickFMS from a-mantra is a cloud based facility management system which enhances organization’s efficiency.