Organizations employing work from home in the age of corona

As the corona virus cases are on the rise more and more companies are trying to employ work from home opportunities. Getting large numbers of white-collar employees to work from home has never been more critical. India’s low infection numbers thus far defy the exponential spread of Covid-19 the world over, suggesting that the low reported infection rates are the result of inadequate testing.

Chances are people in the age group between 20 years and 50 years are most likely to be exposed to the virus at work.

A study released on 14 March based on a region of France, one of the countries where the epidemic has moved with the ferocity of a forest fire, found that school closures for eight weeks—as Indian cities have recently adopted—had a limited effect.

When combined with 25% of the adult population telecommuting, however, such levels of social distancing “delay the peak by almost two months with an almost 40% reduction of the case incidence at the peak", according to the study.

In the past month, large numbers of companies all over the world have switched to work from home. Seattle, hit by the first outbreak in the US, saw the early adoption by companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. towards the end of February.

Investment bank JPMorgan Chase and Co. asked thousands of its employees to work from home in March. Twitter Inc. made it mandatory on 11 March.

In a memo worthy of comic strip Dilbert, Apple Inc.’s chief executive Tim Cook encouraged all employees in the company’s global offices to work from home in the second week of March in order “to reduce human density and ensure those teams on site can do their work safely and with peace of mind". The offer did not apply to those at its retail stores, according to a report in Bloomberg.

In short these decisions help slowdown the spread of the virus and also fewer vehicles log jammed on Delhi-Gurugram roads or those headed to the Electronic City in Bengaluru.