Mumbai, Maharashtra, India : The world has moved like a pendulum ever since the pandemic, oscillating between the actual office and home office. After being hit by the virus, remote work was the key to resume and carry business. This has definitely varied across sectors. However, as we navigate ahead and foresee a pandemic free future, remote is here to stay with the kind of benefits it offered to both- the organization and people.
As Cimpress, being a technology and design organization, embraces remote-first approach, its primary mode of work will be remote, focusing on the convenience of the employees to work from anywhere and occasional presence in the office as a collaboration centres, as and when needed. The organization is working towards building an operating model, aligning its work culture, creating maximum value with remote-first approach at the same time, keeping enough scope and flexibility for in-person collaboration and enabling our teams to decide whatever works the best.
At Cimpress, every employee is encouraged to balance their personal and professional life by enabling a flexible work environment. With teams spread across the globe, remote working and flexibility to figure ways of working around timings and location, has always been an inherent part of our culture and employee value proposition. However, things have changed drastically since the pandemic and remote-first work appears to be the promising future of work.
There is immense potential in our shift to remote-first. First thing first, it’s the opportunity for our team members to work more flexibly, from anywhere and collaborate in ways we never have before. In terms of acquiring new diverse talent, it enables us to recruit and hire from a much broader set of geographies. In FY21, the organisation hired 854 professionals remotely, across technology and design roles. We kickstarted FY22 by hiring 99 freshers from 20 tech colleges, onboarding all of them remotely on the same day. We aim to further continue at the same pace, across technology and design roles.
In terms of investing for the future, we will make time to time investments based on the trends and learnings, be it satellite collaboration spaces, collaboration tools, employee benefits and so on. We expect our remote-first strategy to create an environment and culture in which team members can thrive and be more involved, productive and engaged.
The overall attrition rate for FY21 has been 9.59%, which is less than half of the industry average, testifying for the great employee engagement and work culture, considering the difficult retention environment over the last year within the industry. On the productivity front, as per Cimpress’s internal survey, 98% of managers were in complete agreement that the productivity of their team during the pandemic was on par or higher in comparison to pre-pandemic. Similarly, 98% of the working employees said that they were confident in delivering on outcomes during extended “Work from Home” periods. With respect to what they like the most about remote work, 64% said that they are able to save commute time, and 61% said they can spend more time with their family, resulting in a higher work-life balance.
Mr. Ameya Sane, HR Director, Cimpress India said, “Employee wellbeing is at the heart of our employee value proposition. We strongly feel that “remote first” will greatly help employees to enrich their lives with right amount of flexibility and still be able to deliver competitively. We have empowered our teams to be at the driver seat to decide what works for them and what does not. We have embraced remote work but there are still many unknowns. We have the belief and the intent but, not all the answers, and we are prepared to continually learn and quickly adapt based on trends and choices our teams make. We will be agile in creating infrastructure that caters to diverse choices.”
