Tech firms scramble to shield workers against new virus

New Delhi: With the coronavirus cases growing by every passing hour, Indian tech companies have scrambled to find solutions to safeguard their employees from the deadly virus and flexible working hours/work from home is on top of their minds.

As on March 4, at least 28,529 persons were brought under community surveillance and are being monitored in India, with 29 confirmed cases, according to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan.

Industry veterans said that while it may be unplanned, now is a great time for companies to look at how they enable and empower their distributed workforce to collaborate.

Doing so will pay dividends into the future, long after the current threat has subsided, according to Peter Quinlan, Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration Product Management, Tata Communications. "As a global company with a highly distributed workforce, we've had in place flexible working policies -- like work from home, flexible working hours, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and virtual collaboration environments -- as well as a variety of unified collaboration technologies widely adopted within the company," Quinlan said in a statement.

India's leading digital payment platform Paytm on Wednesday shut its offices in Gurugram and Noida for at least two days after one of its employees who had recently travelled to Italy tested positive for COVID-19.

Worldwide, companies like Amazon and Facebook are battling Coronavirus cases at their offices.