Migrating 600+ team members to Work-From-Home in three days!

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Around a month back, we were conducting a “Dreamweaving” session for Indus Net Technologies. This is a session where INTians come to weave a dream for INT of the future.

One dream was “INT to become a 100% remote work company in FIVE years”. Point taken, and a valid suggestion given that remote working is a rising trend. But not easy, as there is a momentum, habit, and dependency of working from the office, among people, discussing things face-to-face.

However, as luck would have it, within weeks, we are facing a BLACK SWAN event of GIGANTIC proportion, which has changed the world forever. And, things that we thought will take FIVE YEARS to achieve was implemented in less than FIVE DAYS.

These FIVE DAYS last week were very stressful. We took decisions by minutes, everyone came together, everybody cooperated, worked without watching the clock, and ganged up together to beat the challenge that stood in front of us. Innovative solution sprang up from nowhere, people stepped up and went beyond their area-of-expertise and within days, we prepared 600+ people for Work-From-Home. And, we prepared such that we can continue this for months if required.

This is just the start – we will need to create strong methodologies so that none of us slack off, we can collaborate better and we can move fast when our old habit wants to pull us back. We will learn many things in this process, and we will become a stronger and more mature organization.

Few learnings:

– We always underestimate our ability to bring change. We estimated five years, though we could have actually done in five days!

– We can achieve the most difficult task if the team is aligned with the goal. Everybody wanted business continuity for the interest of INT and to safeguard our collective interest.

– Solutions can come from the most unexpected corners

– If put in chaos, people will self organize themselves to achieve the goal, as long as the goals are communicated

– The barrier is in our minds. And these barriers fall apart when you have to think outside the box to survive. And new ideas/methodologies surface. We were not able to do an all-company all-hands for years due to a lack of space. However, now, we are already thinking of doing so using a webinar. We could have done it earlier, but we were always constrained by thoughts and limitations that we made up in our minds.

I have no doubt, that as a company, Indus Net Technologies will evolve much stronger, much agile and much-improved company from this crisis.

And, we will tide through the imminent recession – after all, we have a history of surviving and thriving in recessions.