The wave ebbing out
In spite of its potential, telecommuting in India hasn't caught on at all and only a handful of companies offer it as an option. Hewlett-Packard is one of the very few with a few alternate work options like flexi-time, telecommuting, half-day-home and half-day-office and job-sharing (where the company hires two persons for one post allowing a part-time arrangement between them). NIIT has also embraced the concept of telecommuting and flexi-time, especially when it comes to female employees who have just had a child.
Datamatics Technologies passes on data-entry assignments from its international clients to its network of vendors working from home. Datamatics picks and delivers the assignments from the vendor's doorstep.
Says Rajan of Indiatelejobs.com, "Telecommuting exists in India in its primitive form - the Resident Manager profile. Forbes Marshall who have a very good telecommuting marketing setup, Monsanto Chemicals India, India Software Group (a Birla Group IT company), Maars Software have successful telecommuting programs in place."
India has become a hot destination for a different form of teleworking or telecommuting, which involves back office services like AFS and World Network Services (WNS), back-office operations set up by Swissair and British Airways in India and remote processing such as medical transcription.
Call centres are considered as a form of telecommuting set up by companies in the US and Europe, who outsource work to countries like India who have a large pool of skilled workers. They take advantage of the time lag and cheap labour in India to reduce the cost of running the same operation in their own countries. But these organisations are more likely to have entire departments outsourced rather than allow individuals to telecommute and do the same work from their homes.
In addition, sites like telelabor.com, a 'foreign labour' portal offer cheap labour from developing countries like India to companies overseas, as Indian telecommuters are far cheaper than their counterparts in US.
Right here in India, the newly launched Indiantelejobs.com aims to help telecommuters in India look for jobs and work from a home office.
"We have noticed that there is a good response from telecommuting jobseekers though not much from employers," says Indiantelejobs' Rajan. "However we haven't yet started promoting our site and are in the process of adding additional features."
Anurag Srivastava, Director of the People Department, Talisma Corporation says that employees can do a part of their jobs from home on a selective basis where it is possible. "Allowing employees to log in and answer mails from home has certainly increased productivity. For example, replying in real-time to a customer based out of US, which has a different time zone, can be done from home and employees need not come to office for that. So in that sense employees can figure out the hours they wish to work out of home and out of office."
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