Druva Supports Employees in India With Extensive Benefits as Remote Working Continues Until Spring of 2021

Druva, Inc., the leader in Cloud Data Protection and Management, today announced plans to ramp up its workforce in India within the next 12 months, even as it extends remote working for all employees until the spring of 2021. Since initiating a mandatory remote working policy earlier this year to protect employees and the larger community, Druva has supported its local workforce of almost 500 employees with a number of unique benefits including a home office update allowance, office equipment loaning, career enhancement initiatives, additional days off designed to support mental health and virtual wellness and training programs.

Since March 2020, Druva has successfully transitioned its global employees to a work from home model. To seamlessly enable this transition, the company has focused on supporting its employees to create a productive environment away from the traditional office, even amid the uncertainty of the pandemic. Greater emphasis has been paid on ensuring employee work-life balance, supporting challenges and concerns associated with remote working and offering more flexible work schedules to support impacted families.

“In unprecedented times like these employees expect their organisation to care about their well being above everything else,” said Milind Borate, co-founder and Chief Development Officer, Druva. “From the beginning of the pandemic-induced lockdown, we decided to focus on the safety, flexibility and remote training and development opportunities for our employees. Adapting to trends and working to overcome challenges has been part of Druva’s DNA since its founding and it is no different now. Be it the employee assistance program, allowance for home office upgrades or extension of remote working, everything is being done with our employees in mind, and we have emerged stronger than before.”

Other initiatives and benefits Druva has offered employees include:

 

• Employee assistance program (EAP) to provide holistic mental wellness support for all India employees and their dependents through designated, professional counsellors.
• Revised Fitness Reimbursement Policy to encourage a well-rounded and healthy lifestyle for employees and their immediate family members. This includes reimbursement for expenses related to a variety of wellness activities including subscriptions for online fitness classes, fitness trackers, sports equipment and exercise DVDs/videos and games.
• Extending Insurance in some key areas along with an employee paid top-up option, which will allow employees to extend coverage for themselves and their dependents while still having access to all the benefits of the existing corporate policy. An EMI payment option has also been introduced to provide employee support in managing the premium.
• Concierge Services have been extended to a door-step service while the company maintains a remote working model.

The remote working model has also minimally impacted the company’s regular activities, including onboarding, business delivery, timely promotions and annual salary increases. While the company continues to closely review the ever-evolving situation, Druva is committed to expanding its local presence and is on track to add 15-20 percent new headcount in Pune over the next few months. Once a return to office is deemed safe, the company intends to roll out a phased approach, with a hybrid model for some departments. The company is now focused on further accelerating growth through 2021 as it sees a greater need for its cloud data protection technologies during these times of increased cloud migration.

 

About Druva

 

Druva delivers Data Protection and Management for the cloud era. Druva Cloud Platform is built on AWS and offered as-a-Service; customers drive down costs by up to 50 percent by freeing themselves from the burden of unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management. Druva is trusted worldwide by over 4,000 companies at the forefront of embracing the cloud. Druva is a privately held company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and is funded by Sequoia Capital, Viking Global Investors, Tenaya Capital, Riverwood Capital and Nexus Partners. Visit Druva and follow us @druvainc.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201122005066/en/

WordPress Launches Tool for Remote Working

Automattic, the WordPress’s parent company, has recently launched its own internal remote-team collaboration tool, P2, to the public for the first time.

P2 organizes all files, projects, and conversations on one screen, so a team can collaborate from anywhere. It’s perfect for remote teams, digital nomads, extended families — anyone who doesn’t like email or meetings.

Interestingly, Automattic is itself an office-less, globally distributed company, and the company calls 'P'2 as is its lifeblood. "We built it to give everyone a place to see all of their projects and files, collaborate transparently, and to do it all without constant distractions, " said Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Auttomatic, who has long-held prediction that remote work is the future.

Currently in Beta stage, P2 runs on WordPress.com and allows Real-time messaging, creating secure internal teams, or collaborating with vendors and partners with a range of general privacy and user access options.

One can use P2 across multiple timezones for things like writing company-wide blog posts or acting as a 'virtual water cooler' to help teammates connect around the world.

0.2% IT Workforce are Highly Productive Making them Work from Home Champions - SCIKEY Research

• 0.2% Professionals are Work from Home Champions


• Given the right engagement, every employee can excel at working from a remote location from their team leader.

The SCIKEY MindMatch Report reveals that 99.8% of the workforce are incapable of working from home and only 0.02% are Work from Home Champions and showcase highly productivity atributes. Furthermore, the SCIKEY research indicates that 99.8% of the workforce lack at least one of these qualities. It highlights that 95% job seekers are resistant to learning and exploring, 65% lack in practical communication skills and 71% lack in planning and execution.  

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, all organizations are engaging its employees in remote work places. To drive successful business outcomes, companies need to encourage high productivity for their remote working employees. Employees need to posses crucial traits as a necessity for a productive work from home regime.

Every individual is driven by a different force and identifying an employee's strength and weakness, plays a crucial role in enhancing remote productivity. Basis their personality types, companies can enhance the productivity of their employees.

The study further revealed, 16.97% of the employees are Challenge driven. Such employees should be given challenging tasks and can work seamlessly with minimum intervention. The study identified 17% of employees as Instruction driven and need clear cut direction to deliver a task. While engaging with these employees, especially under the remote working scenario, one should pay close attention to the details of the tasks assigned to them. 

The data reveals that 40.42% of the IT workforce is logic-driven. In order to engage remotely with them, it becomes mandatory to assign them a task that is logic-driven and to answer their queries, no matter how small or how many.They are pro at working alone, so remote working is not a challenge for them as long as they can clarify all their doubts corresponding to the task. They will proactively update on their progress report. 12.7% of the IT workforce comprises of employees who thrive on their social interactions. As a result, work from home is a challenge for them. They do not fear the task but fear the lack of social interaction. In order to engage such a person remotely, a daily virtual communication becomes mandatory and a face to face video conferencing is definitely uplifting. 

Finally the research indicated that around a quarter of the workforce comprises of the individuals who value and respect hierarchy. These individuals will follow orders and do what is told to them even without an instruction manual. In case of absence of the instructions, they weigh the task at hand and come up with a process of their own. Therefore, as long as the task is coming from their superiors, they are capable of carrying it out provided they are given the necessary support. They should be provided with any assistance they seek, especially in the case of a remote engagement. 

These are the findings of the survey on ' Creating work from home champions- Enhancing Productivity in crisis conducted by SCIKEY, a talent lifecycle management venture. The report is based on insights from 10,559 respondents. These mainly include IT professionals from different domains such as Software Developers, IT Infrastructure, Technology Support, Project Managers, Architects, Support Engineers, Business Development, Digital Marketing, UI/UX Engineers, etc. between the age group of 22 to 47 from states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Haryana and West Bengal. The SCIKEY Research Report has been derived from the SCIKEY MindMatch Algorithm. This algorithm can map a professional's mindset that is based on a set of questions that understand the individual's emotional quotient, ego filters, aspirations and belief levels, habits and the ecosystem disturbances that cause distractions & stress in a professional’s life. This data is further filtered to derive professional behavioural elements of any individual and is termed as "Mindset Map". 

Mr. Shriram Viswanathan, Co-founder, SCIKEY said, "Understanding the mindset of the workforce is extremely crucial especially during these extraordinary times. To enhance the employee productivity, managers and team leaders need to identify the driving force of their employees and engage with them accordingly.

Given the right direction, any individual can be guided to become work from the home champion. The key to this lies with the manager who is accountable for shouldering this task.

ABOUT SCIKEY

SCIKEY is a research-backed innovative venture with an efficient AI driven platform, MindMatch and Automation powered talent solution to deliver transformative results for clients and their Human Capital. 

At SCIKEY, we provide end to end technology & people science enabled solutions to cover the entire talent lifecycle right from Talent Discovery & Attraction to Talent Alignment & Engagement, towards ensuring organisation productivity and longevity; in process creating a happier human capital.

SCIKEY's Global ecosystem owns several IPs in the field of Human Behaviour Analysis & Prediction. It comprises of R&D centres in Europe & India, global R&D Partners, collaborations with global universities and a team of expert researchers & data scientists.