Remote Work Done Horribly Wrong - True Story of Covid Work Culture in a Fortune 500 IT Company!

Shweta (name changed) works remotely from India as a Senior Data Scientist for a Fortune 500 IT company (Microsoft/TCS/Accenture/Infosys). Here is her typical work schedule:

• Two hour meeting with US team to discuss status/issues: 8-10am
• Do coding work on git repo to fix issues: 10-12am
• Take break for lunch / take care of child: 12-2pm
• More staggered documentation/data analysis work: 2- 4pm
• Occasional meeting with colleagues to discuss minor work issues: 4- 6pm
• Break for tea: 6-7pm
• Sprint team meeting: 7-9pm
• Ocassional work in night to wrap up issue: 1-2 hours upto 1am

Total time spent in meetings: 4-6 hours
Total time spent in work per day: 8-12 hours

Let us analyze what went wrong here, and how this culture is really wasting companies/her time and resources:

• Large amount of time doing unnecessary meetings. While working remotely people must learn to work independently and put effort to write documents rather than pinging each other on each small instance
• The company has clearly just substituted offline conversations with online meetings and not put any effort in remote tools / asynchronous communication
• There are people whose role is Sprint Manager. The main and sole purpose of his job is to schedule meetings :) All such Managers need to do their job and thus a need to schedule more meetings!
• Due to cultures aspects employees are hesitant to say no to such meetings or interruptions from other colleagues
• In office work, office is shut at 6pm. Here remote working is a license to continue working till night without personal boundaries

The company has clearly just substituted office talk to online meetings and hasn't put any effort in understanding remote work. Further bureaucracy / hierarchy in the big company has made matters worse. There is a need for these companies to really understand remote working and improve, else it is only a matter of time until Shweta jumps ship.