COVID19 : Somnetics Focuses on Employee EQ

Shantanu Som, CEO, Somnetics – Som Imaging Informatics talks about helping employees re-orient themselves.

How can organizations ensure the emotional quotient of employees during these challenging times?

We all know that COVID19 situation almost came as a shock. We did not get any long term mental preparation that this is going to come and this is going to happen. What we now actually try to do is basically make an individual feel that he is not alone in this. Team meetings over Zoom or Skype is actually now a mandate in the evening. At the end of the day, that gives them a kind of satisfaction of being together and working together. They discuss a lot of things that are beyond business, like, how are you doing? In fact I got the feedback that they are very happy with the situation, they are feeling that they are not alone but a part of the team actually. Secondly, we have already declared monetary incentives so that they get some kind of encouragement. These incentives are actually for working good and we are also taking feedback from the customers with whom they are working.

In that way if the customer has got some issues about anybody then the team leader is trying to resolve it. So, the mental pressure is actually less on employees because we are all working together. We are regularly sharing the best practices like what is actually happening in other organizations. I am also getting a lot of best practice scenario from NASSCOM and CII. We are actually circulating it to our Whatsapp groups so that they feel encouraged about that.

How are Indian mid-tier IT players prepared for re-skilling or re-orientation of their employees in a changing business model?

If the situation of the lock down and partial lock down continues for a long period of time, we need to take a really hard and serious look at it. If we even open up partially and if we have any new recruit, he would be asked to actually work from home for at least two to four days in a month so that he gets the feel and gets the practice of doing it.

We have got a couple of junior employees who never worked from home but right now since they are working from home their seniors are always guiding them to do this and that. In some cases, if the customers are getting annoyed and the junior employees are not being able to understand or not being able to collaborate, the seniors are getting into the scene and holding their hands. This hand holding is very important for this.

If the lock down continues we will definitely allow people to work from home forcefully which means that it will be a part of the mandate. They will be scheduled they are you’re performing.

If lockdown continues, home improvement and home auditing is very important. We have already done it. We have sent people to their homes and we have actually audited their working environment. This includes even the quality of the chair, placement of the desktop, quality of Internet connection and everything. When they are working from home, there should be some minimum quality for that place. If any employee is not in a position to do it, we are actually offering him capex also for improvment.

What are the new technologies which mid-tier companies can adopt in similar situations to avoid business disruption?

Couple of days back, a result of an online survey about Indian SMEs actually came out and it shows that 80% of the SMEs had no Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and 50% of them never heard of BCP.

There should be a business continuity plan whether you call it BCP or you call it with any other name. Otherwise there will be a big problem with your revenue because if you do n’ot serve, you cannot sell. If you do not serve your customers, then from where their revenue is going to come. So it is very, very evident that BCP is very important. We have been completely aware that there is a requirement for BCP and we took it very seriously.

We have to have some kind of pre preparation for that. Until and unless you do not have any preparation for BCP, you cannot implement BCP overnight. We understood that there can a lock down, so we started our planning and everything. The execution was complete almost 10 days back, on 19th March, four days ahead of when Government announced the lock down.

That shows our preparedness regarding the BCP. There are four important components of BCP. First is basically the awareness and re-creation of teams. A team should be there and that should be completely aware of their responsibilities, laid out plans and written plans and SOPs, i.e. standard operating processes for BCP. The gap analysis should be there because when you actually want to implement that BCP overnight, it is not going to take place like that. There will be gapsand there will be glitches. You need to completely assess that it willbe glitch free while we are going to implement it. So there should be BCP audits and we used to have BCP audits every two months for the last four years.

After the implementation of ISO 27000 1& ISO 20000, this has become a kind of a practice for us. This preparedness is very important because I saw that lot of people were running helter-skelter buying laptops, desktops, RAM, UPS, on the last day when the government announced the lock down. That actually did not happen in our case, because we have been completely prepared for that. And last but not least the information security is important. Since you’re working with very high end clients, Fortune 500 companies, the governments abroad, and so the information security team is important. That is why the site audit of homes are important. Our teams used to actually do site audit of homes, even much before the pandemic actually happened.