Private lender Axis Bank is reportedly planning to continue with the Work-From-Home (WFH) culture even after the coronavirus crisis. The lender is planning to allow its employees to work for two-three days a week from home.
The lender has a total workforce of nearly 12,000 employees around India and it plans to implement the WFH model for the employees in the non-customer facing roles. As a pilot, the model has been split into two departments namely compliance and HR.
Axis Bank will be adding other departments later such as risk and corporate credit and eventually roll out the model for all its employees in the next six weeks.
However, departments such as treasury front-end, operations, and other employees will be working in branches as they require physical presence.
Once the lockdown ends, Axis Bank will open its branches in three phases. Beginning in May 17, only 10 percent of its employees will be allowed to work from offices. From July 1 to July 15, 30 percent of the employees will be comig to the office, and will subsequently increase to 60 percent.
“While COVID-19 has posed a lot of challenges, it has also opened up new approaches to work. Adapting to work from home/work from outside office/work from anywhere is going to provide lots of opportunities to attract varied talent pools, break geographical boundaries, give more choices to employees and is going to lead to a more structured, measurable, efficient and smart workplace. This will also remodel lots of human resources (HR) belief and practices around employee engagement, talent management,” Rajesh Dahiya, Executive Director – Axis Bank, told Mint.
To maintain safety and security of transactions, employees prone to cybercrimes will not be considered to work from home, Dahiya clarified.
“We are taking care of the risks involved in each transaction and communication over the digital platform. We could have initiated the work-from-home policy in normal times as well. Earlier, the (WFH) policy was more individual-focussed. Now, we are putting a structure in place,” he added.
