How a robust WFH policy helped ICICI Lombard employees

Businesses are now in the middle of a pandemic, the likes of which was never witnessed before. Hence, IT leaders have had to come up with a BCP pronto. Girish Nayak, Chief-Customer Service, Technology and Operation, ICICI Lombard GIC, too took charge and enabled IT infrastructure that will help most employees work remotely.

Employees across locations were assigned laptops and access to systems over VPN or private cloud that will help them in supporting business. “For most of our sales partners including distribution tie-ups, agents, brokers we always had digital platforms for most of their day-to-day work such as quotes, policies and other transactions, they are also able to gather all the information that they need in terms of products, processes and even payments,” Nayak says.

Covid challenges

The first challenge for ICICI Lombard was to now obtain enough laptops for the remaining workforce that were essential for business continuity and the second challenge was to ensure that each of these employees had access to systems over VPN or private cloud.

“Like any other organization, we had to scramble at the last minute to obtain enough laptops for employees so that business continuity could be maintained. For those employees where we have not been able to give laptops, we have been enabling the required applications to be available on their mobile devices in order to allow them to discharge their duties in a WFH environment,” Nayak adds.

The second challenge was for the technology and partner teams to enable applications and systems over the VPN to help employees get the requisite access to help them support business.

Work from home policy

In terms of policies, Nayak says, “We immediately rolled out a Work from Home policy. The policy was created to ensure that employees were enabled to work from home and be able to fulfill their work commitments, stay connected with their managers, their teams and the broader organization.

As a part of the policy, there were additional guidelines on how to handle confidentiality of data and work, safety and security of personal computers and access to specific applications using VPN or remote server.”

Dealing with IT budgets

No one could have predicted the gravity of the current situation even a quarter ago. With this current pandemic, every organization will need to look at their overall budgets, including their IT budget.

Nayak believes that with a bulk of people working remotely, immediate budgets will be focused on improving seamless and secure remote operational capabilities including IT security, enabling cloud and data center infrastructure as required. Similar to most other organizations, ICICI Lombard is looking at its overall budgets, including the IT budget. “Services and support that is essential for business to continue functioning smoothly will take priority in times like this,” says Nayak.

Long term benefits

This is a great opportunity for organizations to test the work-from-home concept, believes Nayak. “All organizations will be keeping an eye on the overall productivity of their workforce to make sure this concept works out. In the long run, if productivity stays the same or improves, employees will actually spend less time traveling, will have fewer sick days and therefore take less time off, be less distracted and take smaller breaks.

Overall it should also reduce the carbon footprint driven by lesser use of cars. These new ways of working will hopefully highlight benefits of working from home and might lead to increased flexibility for both organizations and individuals,” he concludes.

Source: The Economic Times