Is telework a real “new way of working” for you?

Sumit Roy. – “We are a hybrid IT service delivery company with offshore (from India) and onshore (in Europe and the UK) teams working together with teleworking methods and tools. So while, for us, teleworking is not new, the changes within the process of teleworking have been new for us. For example, earlier teams were all located in remote locations close to our customers in Luxembourg, Germany, France, the UK, Sweden, Czech Republic and India. After the pandemic induced lockdown started, all the teams members also had to start working from home. Working remotely is not the same as working from home, the entire collaborative work across our different sites in Europe and India was disrupted. Since one year, we are helping our employees and our costumers work from home.

Is there a disconnect with certain employee profiles regarding telework?

“Yes, some had issues with their home infrastructure. People’s homes were not equipped to guarantee a strong work from home environment. As an employer, we had to provide the necessary tools and frameworks to those employees. This included creating a virtual team environment for progressing with their planned activities and ensuring that disaster recovery systems and options were made available to all employees.

Digitalisation is referred to as the “number one backup” (cf. the health crisis). Is it really the miracle solution?

“It is definitely the logical solution, if not the miracle solution.

In fact, there is a difference between digitisation and digital transformation. The game changer would be an enterprise-wide digital transformation that would enable an organisation to optimise their operating models from within office locations as well as to be ready to work from remote location, including working from home.

I say this because digital transformation covers an overall change in the processes how an organisation and the people work making best use of digitisation drives within separate areas or functions within an organisation. Digitisation is only about converting enterprise data and information into digital assets. Since it does not cover the enterprise-wide scope and processes to be referred to as a miracle solution.”