Employees in India willing to take salary cuts to work-from-home permanently: Study

As dark clouds continue to loom over, the world economy is slowly making the effort to get back to near-normalcy. The new world order is now set in stone with everything and everyone going contactless, inducing newer habits in consumers as we sail through the COVID-19 crisis. With the majority of companies worldwide taking the decision to permanently work-from-home, Indians seem to have taken a liking to this new working model.

The Mavericks India report titled - “COVID-19 and Beyond: An Evolving Perspective”, based on a survey conducted with 720 respondents from across the country found that 54% love working from home, of which, 34% are willing to take a 10% salary cut to work-from-home indefinitely. This is in direct correlation to the amount of time people spent commuting to and from work in the pre-COVID scenario; 81% of the respondents with more than 90 minutes of one-way commute to the office would love to work-from-home permanently.

Work-from-home: A disruptive normal

56% of the respondents believe that their productivity levels have increased significantly since they began working from home due to the national lockdown in April 2020. In fact, the cohort witnessing the most notable productivity increase appears to be the senior executives and CXOs, of which 31% claimed a productivity increase of 25% or higher since pre-COVID times. Moreover, 39% of the CXO cohort would willingly take a 10% salary cut to work-from-home permanently, as compared to 18% junior executives.

When looking at preferences from a gender standpoint, 56% of the women respondents claim to love the current setup. This is particularly the case with the Gen X women respondents where 80% of them enjoy the flexibility of balancing work and home, while dedicating enough time for their hobbies instead of the tedious commute to and from work. Further, this preference could be attributed to the fact that this model has provided a level playing field for the women workforce, giving them numerous opportunities to explore.

Fear of COVID-19 a new yardstick for a healthier lifesytle?

The fear of the pandemic has subsided significantly since April with only 39% of the respondents living in extreme paranoia in October as compared to 66% in April. This decrease is more pronounced amongst the millennials, witnessing a fall of 33%. CIty-wise, the sharpest drop in concern was witnessed among Chennai-ites with 74% being extremely worried in April 2020 to only 28% in October 2020. Surprisingly only Kolkata has shown an increase in fear or concern from 54% in April to 62% in October 2020.

It is important to note that the fear of COVID-19 is not directly correlated with the number of people one knows who have contracted the virus. For instance, only 22% of those knowing 20+ people displayed a high fear score (4 or higher), while 40% of those knowing 0-11 people displayed a high score. This could mean that the former believe that recovery is possible and that this virus is like any other infection, whereas the latter displays a lower believability related to recoveries, translating into a greater sense of fear.

Further, there’s been a steady increase in people prioritizing better hygiene and sanitation at all times, indoors and outdoors. Chennai and Hyderabad seem to have upped the ante in this regard with a whopping 63% and 79% claiming to maintain better personal hygiene and sanitation since the pandemic made its way to India. This in turn has seen an uptick in the number of new players entering the market in the hand sanitizer category alone; this number stands at 152 currently.