Policybazaar to have 30% staff WFH permanently

Sarbvir Singh had only been CEO of Policybazaar for a few weeks when he was thrown into the deep end. The coronavirus pandemic meant the company had to transition to a work-from-home mode within a matter of days.Looking back at the switch, however, Singh is pleased with the way things worked out.“Working from home was a great experience. I found it was more structured, and I had greater control over my time. It also helped save time on my commute, which was quite a pleasant change,” he tells ETPanache. “More importantly, from an organisation’s perspective, work from home has worked out quite well for us. Even going forward, we are planning to have at least 30 per cent of our staff working from home. This has also opened up new geographic expansion opportunities for us. Being a digital platform, we can now expand operations without the need for physical offices,” he adds.But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. When the lockdown was first announced, they had to put in place new infrastructure to facilitate the change, including 6,000 tablets and phones for their advisors. “It was a huge challenge for us. We have more than 10,000 advisors, all of whom needed infrastructure to begin working remotely,” Singh says.“Our technology and operations teams worked round the clock to deliver this. Thanks to this, we were able to smoothly transition our entire workforce to work from home within a week.”The past three months have taught him that leadership is about action rather than words. “Everybody wants to participate in building something meaningful.When everyone is working from home, it is not helpful to impose your will, but rather carry people along and have them do things they want to do,” Singh adds.75288175

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3ftu8Pq