The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that we don’t need big offices to work. It has also made remote working a possible new normal and we have learnt to manage most of our activities with a basic lifestyle. While many people are comfortable with a work from home lifestyle, the new normal is not for individuals who dislike social distancing or have issues with their laptop or with network connectivity.
By 1st week of March 2020, it was evident that WFH was going to be the new norm. We understood quite early that working remotely would be our future, and hence when the pandemic set in India with full strength during the first week of March, we immediately began getting accustomed to working from home. However, it did come with its own set of challenges. The IT Team went into an overdrive to figure out how many desktops were to be replaced by laptops? How many laptops would be needed to be issued? Our IT Team had the next biggest task of installing, configuring, and replacing all desktops with laptops, and they spent long hours for the next few days to ensure that these tasks were completed on time. We were 100% WFH from day one of lockdown. And, in the true Digital sense, we had the advantage of having all our intranet infrastructure on the cloud, and that included authentication, firewall services and patch updates. The server & networking team supported us well to enable VPN for all, ensuring adequate bandwidth for users connecting to client network using our VPN and ensuring all our laptops were always protected, irrespective of the network they were connected to.
Connectivity issues at the user end were the first to hit us and we had users complaining about poor internet connectivity. Therefore the team then enabled solutions to help people with low bandwidth challenges.
We had another challenge coming our way when we had to conduct our ‘All Happiest Minds Meeting’, and we were not sure how our solutions would work with over 1000 people connecting simultaneously for the meeting and with multiple speakers from across the globe. However, these challenges did not stop us from having quite a successful event which then paved way for multiple online events.
We also had the IS Team releasing applications and features to the existing applications at a pace that was not seen earlier. I guess, WFH has its own benefits.
The next challenging task was resolving IT & Network issues remotely, and some interesting incidents or rather incidents that were not seen at office cropped up more frequently, and, we also had this unusual task of 48 hours of quarantining of machines that were returned and ensuring machines that we give to users were sanitized and then handed over.
Overall, we had an interesting yet busy 3 months with many issues that we could fix, some which we deliberately postponed or ignored, hoping that time will fix them. After all, it still does seem like most of us do miss the coffee breaks, the social gatherings and the fun time with our colleagues over breakfast, lunch or dinner. Oh yes, I almost forgot, we miss working from office too. Hopefully, soon we will be able to get back to the fun days at office.
We are grateful to all the Happiest Minds who made work from home possible and they worked with us to ensure that we provided the required IT support. Kudos to the team. Stay Safe and Stay Healthy.
is Vice President and Chief Information Officer, has over 23 years of experience in diverse technology and management roles. Sajith has varied experience in the IT field, he has handled multiple roles from supporting IT to developing applications to building large teams and to delivering IT initiatives for large enterprise accounts.
Prior to joining Happiest Minds, Sajith worked with MindTree on multiple roles and initiatives. Sajith has also worked with Wipro as an application developer and as a support engineer in the infrastructure and networking group.
