Work-from-home is more of an enabler than a challenge

Backed by business services provider Quess Corp, the Bengaluru-based technology startup Simpliance provides an easy-to-install SaaS-based plug-and-play governance, risk and compliance solutions that simplify labour compliance management for organizations varying from large corporates to start-ups. It also hosts India’s largest digital platform for automated statutory compliance management, which helps businesses comply with Indian Labour laws. The company’s Founder and CEO Anil Prem D'Souza shares insight into how the new generation enterprises are geared up to go 100% work-from-home. Read excerpts from his email responses to Voice&Data.

Anil D’Souza, Founder & CEO, Simpliance

V&D: How are you coping with the lockdown due to COVID-19? How has it impacted the business?

Anil Prem D'Souza: Being governance, risk and compliance organization, we are aware of the risks posed by such events and have in place a complete ‘digital work-from-home framework’, using an online virtual office and enabling employees with laptops. These initiatives have ensured that we at Simpliance do not get affected by the current pandemic.

V&D: What about customer service?

Anil Prem D'Souza: We use our own, internally-developed customer query management tool called Opscon that ensures all customer requests are tracked, responded and resolved within the stipulated time, as per the SLA and agreements with the clients, irrespective of the fact that all employees of the company are at the moment following the mandatory work-from-home.

V&D: So what are the tools that you are using to enable communication and collaboration between the remote workers, partners, and clients during the current situation?

Anil Prem D'Souza: At Simpliance, we have been using the online virtual office called Sococo, which literally replicates the feel of an office. The virtual office has rooms, doors and we can even see our colleagues who are collaborating with others either through audio and video calls or sharing screens, etc. The tool gives the complete feel of being in an office, albeit virtually.

We also track all our daily tasks assigned to employees through one of our own risk management tools, the Internal Controls Module. We have created policies for all business functions and mapped processes and controls for daily and recurring tasks. The tool helps us to track the work done on a daily basis, it has supportive features like evidence upload and the tool is QR-code-enabled.

Some of the top teleconferencing and video-conferencing tools that we are using include Webex, Zoom, and Sococo.

V&D: Security has always been a big concern when switching to a remote working environment. How are you facilitating safe and secure remote connectivity for work-from-home at such a large scale?

Anil Prem D'Souza: We had enabled data cards and dongles to all our employees before this pandemic. Also, since we were mostly working remotely before the pandemic, we had already taken security measures to ensure that there are no data leakages in the laptops while working remotely. From the beginning, our culture has been to manage operations using the virtual platform and all our employees can get complete online access at home. They are trained from day one to use Simpliance Ways of Working (WoW), which is a combination of Sococo and our Internal Controls Module.

V&D: What are the technology and business challenges that you are facing during the lockdown?

Anil Prem D'Souza: Work-from-home is more of an enabler than a challenge for us. We have seen the productivity of our employees increase as they have more time now for themselves and do not have to travel to work in a busy city like Bengaluru. The meetings have become more effective as logging in and logging out from meetings has become faster. Women employees with children and family responsibilities stick longer with us, as we allow work from home without any drop in their performances. In fact, we have a gender ratio of 50:50 in the organization, thanks to our work-from-home policy.