a mARTIAN dIARY

While coming back to Bangalore from cochin, I was astonished at the traffic at my once sleepy town of Cochin. A trip from vazhakala to ernakulam south took me more than 1 hour! Something that would have hardly taken 25 minutes? from the days I remember  (…is it just me or did I just talk like a grandfather talking about the good ole days?? Anyways…)

I guess it’s mostly to do with SMART CITY and related stuff. Cochin hardly had enough infrastructures to support its rustic (:P) population 3-4 years back, but with the sudden influx of the wiproites and the ibsites, I think it will soon be reaching its breaking point. I haven’t read Kerala related news in a while so I don’t have the correct background to say this but if its anything like the normal polices usually seen time after time in kerala , everyone must be expecting the people working in smart city to work, sleep, eat and shit there. But surprise! Surprise! …that’s certainly not the observed trend

Anyway interestingly enough , while coming back , reading or rather trying to read  Kahlil Gibran in the dim DC based light provided by Indian railways, I met this guy, Rajesh, who is a sys admin at Oracle. While talking on the “narrow” spectrum of topics from my misfortune (:P) at being born in Kollam to exhorbant  rates of auto rickshaw drivers , somewhere along the line we touched upon a  very interesting topic of flexibility at work or more specifically speaking of flexibility on WHERE to work from. It seems, depending on the load of work, they had the option of working from home

This got me thinking about the future of IT companies. When thought about it , I felt most (at least a lot ) of the work we do after coming to office is done in front of the computer  without much human interaction. In this respect, most of the work can be done sitting at home too. I am not saying that I don’t work in a team or anything, just that at least some of the work IS like this. In case we work from home, let me try to list out the advantages

• The person can work from environments he most comfortable with , ie his home or in case he doesn’t have a happy home, at least he is the master of where he wants to work from.
• Work Life balance can be improved, since a lot of time that’s currently wasted commuting to and from work can be saved
• Lot of indirect benefits like lesser number of commuters, lower pollution etc
• The company can save on a lot of the cost on facilities!
• Part of the money thus saved can be routed into the accounts of the employees!

Like every decision, it has its bad points too, but I can see a solution to most of that

• Security is the immediate thing that comes to one’s mind, but naturally we are not taking about granting complete access to the person. Let’s face it, security in more than one senses is a sham. The information is secure as long as you believe it’s secure, and even if the employee comes and works from your location and you have blocked all access, some geek/non-conformist is bound to find a way to crack/hack all that. In this respect, trust would be very important both from the companies’ side and employee’s sideAlso I am not suggesting this for all kinds of work. One suggestion is to use something of a virtual OS onto which the remote user can log in
• Work invading into home. A lot of people feel that they can achieve work life balance by keeping work away from home. Period! This of course is a good way, just like abstinence is a good protection from AIDS, but does not mean that other ways won’t work. If your able to integrate your work/life  seamlessly , that can lead to a very fulfilling life
• Knowledge Creation. It’s possible to argue that knowledge creation within the organization would suffer. But the way I see it, when meetings and other usual offline activities occur online, there is a less effort involved in documenting them, which is the first step in knowledge creation. Its always easier to summarize the minutes of a “chat” meeting than a “face-2-face” meeting and, better still, the whole text of the chat can be saved for future reference too.
• Team Work. Here also if online tools are properly used I feel most of the hurdles can be removed. And maybe in a twist to current culture, we could have employee to meet each other on weekends for fun activities

Obviously I am not suggesting that it’s as simple as it sounds and obviously I have not done an exhaustive analysis of the subject, but then again for the proper kind of work and with proper tools, this vision might not be too far away.

And say if this happens I wonder what will happen to the real estate prices in Cochin