Seasonal spurt

It’s not just sales that get a seasonal spurt during the festive season. The retail sector adds jobs during this time to cope with the demand. For its annual Big Billion Days extravaganza that kicks off on September 29, e-commerce major Flipkart says it has added over 50,000 direct jobs across its supply chain, logistics arm and customer support. In addition to that, it expects to have increased the indirect jobs through the seller network by 30 per cent as compared to last year, taking it to 6.5 lakh people. Flipkart says Big Billion Days will also witness the creation of immense opportunities for nearly 1,35,000 artisans who have come on board with the e-commerce player through its Samarth initiative launched in July 2019.

However, according to Indian Staffing Federation estimates, overall festive season hiring this year is subdued compared to last year. It projects that there will be just 10 to 15 per cent rise in hiring of temp staff compared to last year. This is rather muted growth considering that there was nearly 35 per cent growth last year with two lakh jobs added during the season by different sectors.

Digital personalities

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To understand the impact the digital workplace has had upon employees, networking solutions company Citrix surveyed 1,000 knowledge workers in India, who were studied on a range of workplace issues, including how they access a digital work environment, send work documents for use outside of the office, communicate with colleagues, and save company data.

Based on how differently workers have embraced digital transformation in the workplace, Citrix has sketched out four key technology ‘personas’ among Indian knowledge workers. There is the Challenger (29.34 per cent of workers) who understands the positive impact of technology and is most likely to use their company storage space, such as SharePoint or OneDrive, to access documents outside of the office. However, this leads to risky behaviour, such as using public Wi-Fi with little or no protection.

Then, there is the Power Seeker (28.28 per cent of workers) who are most likely to message their colleagues through unofficial apps like SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat or Telegram to communicate ‘on the go’ – basically inclined to use free online tools. There is the The Knowledge Seeker (23.21 per cent of employees) who believe email is themost comfortable method to communicate with colleagues, and instead of taking a risk, they would check with IT before connecting to a public Wi-Fi network.

Finally, there is the Sceptic (19.17 per cent of workers) who are effective communicators offline but require support in digital contexts. Which type are you?

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