Coronavirus lockdown: IBM India says 99% workforce now working from home

The company provided the option to work remotely to most of its employees even before countries began going under lockdowns

IBM India has enabled work-from-home (WFH) for 99 per cent of its workforce, a senior executive said on Thursday.
 

While the company provided the option to work remotely to most of its employees even before countries began going into lockdown mode because of the coronavirus disease pandemic, it says it has now done so for a much wider workforce.
 

“What has been different in the past few months is embracing this approach at scale, not just among our sizeable employee population in India, but around the world. Our information technology (IT), human resources, business units, crisis management, legal, government relations, corporate social responsibility, operations and security teams have quickly come together to make WFH a reality for over 99 per cent of IBM India employees.
 

The remaining 1 per cent of our people are focused on critical assignments and we are taking every possible precaution to ensure their safety,” said Sandip Patel, managing director, IBM India and general manager for India/South Asia region, in a post on LinkedIn on Thursday.

The two main challenges it faced while doing so, said Patel, were expanding IBM’s infrastructure to meet the high demand for online traffic and enabling its employees to be more productive in the new distributed way of working.
 

“Another critical factor in our enabling over 99 per cent of our employees to WFH was the active collaboration and support from the government authorities and our clients,” he added. The Indian IT industry has been working closely with the government to sort out issues like taking office equipment home, getting requisite permissions to move equipment from special economic zones and so on.
 

IBM is one of the largest employers in the IT services sector in India.
 

In 2018-19, it reported revenue of Rs 27,279 crore and a net profit of Rs 2,426 crore.