How is the company responding to the fight against COVID-19?

At Kronos we believe great business are powered by great people. Our employees always come first, and our primary focus has been towards ensuring their safety and wellbeing. Given the nature of our business, we were quickly able to mobilize working from home for all our employees in India and we are currently running a number of programs to help them remain engaged and motivated.

However, an equally critical area for us has been to support our customers in their efforts to manage the situation. The biggest impact of the COVID-19 crisis has been on the workforce and consequently the workplace and how work itself is performed. As a provider of workforce management solutions, our entire company has been geared to help our customers make the transition they needed. In the initial days of the crisis it was around helping organizations transition to remote working, however as companies are looking at restarting operations, we are working very closely with our customers to help them with key areas like implementing social distancing norms and skeletal staffing at the workplace through our advanced scheduling solutions. And we continue to innovate on the product side. Just recently we introduced the employee contact tracing tool for all our customers across the globe. This tool helps organizations leverage their Kronos workforce management data to identify employees who might have come in contact with an affected employee.

What will be the new trends post COVID?

There is a consensus that post-COVID things are not going to be the same. We are going to see several changes in the workplace and the way people work. One such trend would be the realization that remote working is here to stay wherever it is feasible, and organizations will continue to invest in technologies that enable secure and productive remote working. As roles evolve and the industry shifts it will be important for continued investment in learning and skill development programs to enable personal and professional growth. Therefore, new workplace policy ideation and implementation will be largely based on where and how work needs to be performed.

In India, along with the new regulations around social distancing at the workplace, we are also dealing with a mass migration of labour back to their homes in rural India.  As a result organizations are going to be more focused on workforce planning and tracking operational efficiency. Modern workforce management solutions will be the key enabler here especially in planning out the optimal team size during skeletal staffing, moving towards staggered shifts and enabling contact tracing in the work place.

Sumeet Doshi, Country Manager, India, Kronos Incorporated, Mumbai