91���� graduates had the privilege to be a part of this initiative that aims to combat the gender-based violence crisis. The Infotitans came up with a well-defined solution securing them the bronze medal.

The team conceptualized a community-based platform that brings together people from different walks of life to unitedly fight the menace of gender-based violence. The technologies that are integrated to help solve this crisis include a mobile app that allows the user to be tracked by syncing the app with another wearable tracking device. The responders include drones, the police, trusted members, and the community at large. It is a futuristic revolutionary tech concept and we are proud of this solution. It was not just accepted and appreciated, but it met the criteria set by the judges as well.

I was amazed, excited, and humbled to see our entire team come together to develop this concept that has the potential to impact and change so many lives, thereby making our society a safer place. The best moments were created while turning nothing into something. The team’s enthusiasm, passion, eagerness to give back to society, hunger to learn, and make a difference made me a very proud mentor. I learned that we, as the youth of Africa and the world, must stand up and fight for our future generations. Moments like these are a wake-up call to use technology judiciously and to bring about a positive change in society.

I commend the dedication and the spirit of teamwork that helped us win the bronze medal. There could never be a substitute for having a great team, unified in achieving a common goal. I had the privilege to mentor six brilliant individuals and bind them together for a period of three weeks. The experience taught me a lot about the utilization and management of people’s skills in the right way. The welfare of the team was as important as achieving the job at hand. I also learned the importance of task tracking, product building, and how to make a good sales pitch.

Interacting with diverse people teaches you how different minds work, what their thought processes are like; it is like a rainbow, different colors, but beautiful when brought together. I am grateful to have been able to stitch together these young minds into creating a meaningful and substantial solution for the wellbeing of society.

Author:

Tebatso Msiza
Associate IT Consultant

Reference:

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So now I am at home, glued to my TV screen following the news of the latest stats and fatalities. The anxiety sets in, “what about my elderly parents, what about the people who do not have food stored away for days, what about…” The news is not helping my state of anxiety with their ominous tone around the current events and the increasing numbers of infections. Social media is going crazy with messages of condolences, home remedy recipes and conspiracy theories around the pandemic. And amid all this craziness, there is still work. Yes, the show must go on despite the global pandemic but with all the people who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic, work is now viewed as the privilege that it is.

I had been working from home for years, so it was certainly not a new concept to me. I remember my 50-year-old aunt ranting about how she would rather prefer to work from the office because this working from home thing was not working for her. However, even though I was not new to working from home, there was still the nagging fact that there is a global pandemic that affected my ability to focus like I used to. I was happy to discover that I was not the only one experiencing this. I sympathized profusely with my friends who were going through everything I was plus having little kids. Not only were they faced with all the anxiety, uncertainty, work, and household chores but they also had to keep their little ones entertained and educated (and out of their videoconferencing calls).

The funny thing about life however (global pandemic or not) is that things always seem to work out. For me it started working out when I stopped watching and listening to the news and started meditating, walking and yoga. My perspective began to shift from impending doom to hope and even excitement for the future. I became ready for the new normal and all it had to offer. This positively affected my work and ability to concentrate. Some of my friends also expressed that, even though at times they had some melt-down moments with their kids, they were actually happy that they got to spend more time with them and that the kids reveled in having their parents around them more. We all seem to have learned to value each other (even that irritating work colleague) more and make our time count which is a beautiful thing. After all, you never know when you will be hit with another global pandemic.

Author:

Candice Thomas
Business Transformation

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Work need not lead to stress. It should lead to a sense of self-fulfillment and achievement. At 91����, our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) aims to create a compelling work environment that maintains the physical and financial health of employees along with their mental well-being, allowing us to enhance our people strength. This strength allows us to win in our weight category.

The moments of truth

The Sixth Moment of Truth creates mental well-being by driving a culture of social and psychological security through empathy with a sense of inclusivity driven by openness and trust. A focus on mental well-being is important because it impacts individuals, their working ecosystem, and their relationship with different people in the employee network

The widespread impact that an employee’s mental well-being can have is understood and appreciated by enterprises across the world. But a National Employee Mental Wellbeing Survey showed that 35 percent of employees approached no one for support on the most recent occasion they experienced poor mental health. In addition, another 86% employees said they would think twice before offering to help a colleague whose mental health they were concerned about. This implies the need for enterprises to be pro-active in managing mental health. Unless they do so, a pandemic like COVID-19 can quickly lead to panic and deterioration in employee performance. 91���� considers it a duty to make its employees mentally resilient, especially when life and livelihood are under threat. Our goal is to ensure there is no corrosion in the decision-making capabilities of employees, their sense of responsibility and their relationships with colleagues and customers.

Understanding Our Ecosystem

An analysis of 91���� provides insights for an action plan to ensure that mental wellbeing does not become a matter of concern. This involves:

• Understanding motivational drivers of employees that can strengthen the impact on peers and others
• Managerial sensitization that enables better management of a multi-generational workforce
• Creating self-awareness that helps employees manage their relationships better
• Optimum managerial spans that promote psychological and social safety by building a culture of inclusivity, trust and openness through regular connects

The unique nature of COVID-19 demands extraordinary support for employees. To deal with this, we have identified four situations that call for urgent attention:

• Emotional issues emerging out of the probable spread of Corona virus
• Emotional issues because of social distancing/ distributed working
• Challenges because of quarantine restrictions
• Impact of identified COVID-19 positive employee

To address the anxiety and panic that the above situations can lead to, we have instituted a formal system:

• Availability of self-help online resources that includes a portal with assessment and tools along with online resources on COVID-19 related coping resources.
• Manager support available to employees.
• COVID-19 specific communication such as mailers and resources circulated to all employees.
• Live chats and webinars by experts on self-care during the pandemic, dealing with social Isolation, enhancing productivity while working from home and building emotional resilience

Measuring Effectiveness

To measure the effectiveness of our approach and to constantly improve it we track metrics, using survey questionnaires, related to:

• Employee Experience or what employees encounter, changing work dynamics, employees’ happiness quotient
• Employee Effectiveness or how well employees build self-awareness, develop empathy towards self and others
• Psychological/Social Safety that includes feelings, attitudes and behaviours that express employees’ commitment, motivation and connection to their work (enthusiasm, satisfaction, indifference, anger)

The mental well-being of our employees is a significant responsibility. Making investments in mental health not only improves productivity but also creates a deep sense of positivity and bonding critical to success in these unusually challenging times.

Author:

Nivedita Saxena
Senior Manager, Training

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Finally, COVID-19 has made the trend of a remote workforce reach its tipping point. Everyone is scrambling to set up processes that allow employees to work from the safety and security of their homes. And in these uncertain, volatile times, it makes sense for us to share our experience with turning remote working into the default mode we plan to carry into the post COVID-19 era.

Remote working has worked out well for us at 91���� so far. We’ve promptly put the hardware, networks, systems access, tools, security and training for Work from Home (WFH) in place, along with continuous focus on taking care of each employee’s requirements to be productive in less than a week from the word go!

To our surprise, over the last few weeks, we now have more answers than problems! I can see just one issue with this success: When employees working from home want to take a break, will they apply for leave and turn up in office? 

As the leader responsible for tracking and improving employee productivity and deployment, COVID-19 brought with it three unique challenges for me:

1. How to ensure effective resource management?

With the uncertainties around COVID-19, we have some customers either deferring project extensions or putting them on hold, while some are announcing new initiatives aimed at putting business back on its rails. This has meant a constantly shifting demand for resources from our customers and changes in the availability of the talent pool. This translates to tracking employees’ availability, skills and capabilities continuously – and at speed—to ensure they can be rapidly re-skilled and re-deployed.

To do this, we are leveraging technology and a virtual marketplace! We are leveraging a portal to show people availability with skills. The portal is accessible to all resource managers across the company. They can access the portal over a VPN from home. Every day, at a defined time, all resource managers virtually come together, with the help of this system, to discuss their resource demand, availability and utilization and identify the right resources to fulfil their demands internally. Analyzing supply and demand used to be a periodic exercise. With the help of enhanced systems, processes and automation, it has now become a continuous exercise to plan, track and leverage capacity.

There was a time when remote working was not very common, and the existing systems and processes used to cater to that requirement of minority users working remotely and productively. Now, it has become essential to have live, rich dashboards and mobile apps that track several metrics and make them available to employees as well as the business leaders. We have created new tools to track manpower productivity, availability and feedback from employees and customers. 91����’s BCP (Business Continuity Planning) Dashboard and Mobile Apps for Timesheet Submission and Employee Connect/Wellness during Covid-19 are such examples, which are making productive and safe WFH possible for all our employees and our customers.

2. How do you hire people and on board them in the times of social distancing?

Remote hiring has made considerable progress in recent times. We see scheduling tools, chatbots and video platforms being used. Some organizations even use sophisticated facial, voice and sentiment analytics to improve their recruitment accuracy and speed. However, the key element is the next step: On boarding employees so well so that they become productive from Day-1. Remember, these employees are not available in-campus any longer, so the processes of making them productive must change substantially! For the moment, we have made onboarding completely remote. In addition to providing home delivery of hardware/software to new joinees, we have also focused on providing a sense of belonging by utilizing a buddy system which pairs new employees with managers/leaders. These managers/leaders are available to new joinees for initial mentoring, for resolving queries and improving their understanding of role, work requirements and company culture.

3. How do you fine tune project processes?

After the enablement of WFH we have noticed that distributed Agile projects have speeded up! Scrum meetings happen more religiously and stakeholders participate more actively. I cannot be sure if WFH has made things more fun for employees (having fun is a tenet of Agile!), but on the face of it, I’d like to believe it has relieved the pressure on travel, made more time available and therefore made things work more smoothly. It is a fact that if people have more time, process adherence improves.

Over the last few days I’ve often wondered why we didn’t do all this before we were compelled by COIVID-19. I don’t have the perfect answer. But it could be because we had the re-assurance that time was on our side, that we could go to market and hire people and make them productive with some hand-holding (there is a reason that term “hand-holding” makes sense, but sounds so last century now!). The world has changed. Time is not on our side. We must learn new ways to run business and we are learning fast!

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