WFH culture, now to be an integral part of Axis Bank

Amid pandemic and increasing lockdown Axis Bank has decided to make Work-From-Home (WFH) an integral part of its work culture. As a part of this strategy, the bank has decided that its employees will continue to work from home for 2 -3 days in a week.

“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," said Rajesh Dahiya, Executive Director, Axis Bank.

The private sector lender is also looking to open offices in three phases once the lockdown is lifted on 17 May. According to Amitabh Chaudhury, the Managing Director and Chief Executive, Axis Bank, it was considering changing its work culture by adopting work-from-home.

Around 12,000 Axis Bank employees, mostly in non-customer-facing roles, are working from large offices across India. The bank said the WFH model can be implemented for them. As a pilot, it has implemented the model for two departments-compliance and HR.

This will be expanded to other departments such as risk and corporate credit and, eventually, rolled out for all these employees over the next six week.

However, employees working in branches, treasury front-end and control operations, and information technology will have to necessarily come to office as their work requires their physical presence, the bank said. On ensuring the safety and security of transactions once employees continue working from home, Dahiya said that departments prone to cyber crimes will not be considered for WFH.

“We are taking care of 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.