Tony Berland, MD & CEO, Legrand Group India talks about business in the time of COVID19 and beyond
How are your teams working and communicating during such times?
Among other critical safety measures, we immediately requested our team members to work from home, wherever possible to limit as far as possible the time spent in commute. The teams are now actively using video calls and virtual meeting tools to communicate amongst themselves so that the day to-day work remains on track. Being part of a global group a portion of our teams were used to these tools in our international meetings, but this situation has made drove us to consider it even for our local meetings.
Systems and processes have seen new changes. Do you feel the new way of working will change the way we worked in offices?
The post COVID-19 workplace will see a new work culture emerge, which will be more comfortable with remote working measures. The current scenario has had companies evaluate their remote working policies to reflect more flexibility and convenience for the employees. This gave us for instance the opportunity to revisit our policy in term of work flexibility (flexi-hours). We will have as well to rethink our strategy and investments in the area of home-office flexibility and infrastructure. On another hand, we are realizing as well the value of a face-to-face meeting in some specific situation or workshops. We will take advantage of these two kinds of solutions to build tomorrow a new and efficient work organization that will probably reduce our time in commute. It will have probably be a nice impact in terms of environment and quality of our lives.
How are you helping your local community during such times?
We are distributing PPE kits and required medical infrastructure for doctors and health workers in Tamilnadu, Delhi, Kerala and Maharashtra. For instance, since the beginning of this pandemic, we took adequate measures to ensure that our telemedicine centres of Jalgaon and Haridwar could continue to operate in an efficient and safe environment.
This is a once in a lifetime event for all of us, do share your reason for optimism?
Our hope is that we will emerge stronger and more agile as individuals and working professionals and that this is a once in a lifetime event which will change our thought processes, work cultures and individual lifestyles.
Every crisis forces us to put forward the best of us and we believe this will be an opportunity for us to reinforce the place of our customers and employees in our organization.
It helps us to confirm as well that health and safety remain the one of the most important factors in driving business and we will continue to ensure that enough measures and investments are in place to secure our team and business partners . We think this situation will ensure positive reinforcement on personal health, which is in itself an upward movement.
