Productivity hasn’t suffered much due to work from home, says Deloitte India’s Anandorup Ghose, ETHRWorld

Deloitte India Partner Anandorup Ghose talks to Tamanna Inamdar about the complexities of working from home and the flaws in productivity metrics. Edited excerpts:

What trends that you are seeing? Does it make sense for businesses to bring employees back into office, pay rents again? Are workplaces realising work-from-home actually turned out to be economical?
I want to take a step back here; when you talk about work-from-home, it is interesting because all of this discussion on work-from-home pertains to a very small percentage of the entire country’s workforce. People who work in manufacturing, people who work in places that have to deliver stuff, retail etc., they have been going to work every single day for the last one-and-a-half years. So the work-from-home phenomenon is only for those who are office goers, whose jobs can be done from a desktop. It’s they who have started working from home. And for this population, there is a wide variance, there is a group who have the comforts of a laptop and a separate room and space, etc. For those that do not, productivity has definitely suffered and not because people do not want to work, it is because their infrastructure does not allow them to work at…