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    First person account: I miss the human connect, says Gen Z first-time employee

    Synopsis

    I joined remotely from hometown Bhubaneswar in June. Usually, onboarding takes a month. For me, it only took a week, maximising on-the-job learning for me.

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    By Shaswati Sagarika, HR Consultant, Deloitte

    When the lockdown was first announced, I thought things will be back to normal soon. A lot of B-school batchmates had their offers revoked. I also faced a few months of anxiety, but the team at Deloitte continued to send out monthly communication reconfirming the offer.

    I joined remotely from hometown Bhubaneswar in June. Usually, onboarding takes a month. For me, it only took a week, maximising on-the-job learning for me.

    The WFH experience has its pros and cons. Your productivity increases, but I don’t have another comparison metric. I’m also extremely grateful I got to spend so much time with family and work on self-care and reading. I’ve lost 8 kg in lockdown!

    I do yearn for face-to-face interaction. A normal workplace would entail meeting people from your generation at lunch and exchanging friendly banter. I miss the human connect. I interact with colleagues regularly, but when you’ve never met, you don’t know them other than their voices or work they do. It’s hard to keep up morale all day long.

    My seniors are empathetic. They’re a call away – always keep checking in on me. I don’t know how different this would be in person because I don’t know any other way of working. I’ve also learned to manage work-life balance at this age.

    It could be that my role becomes location-agnostic. If that happens for a role like front-end consulting, where travel and interactions used to be very important, then it might happen everywhere else. I’m hoping things go back to normal and that it's not permanent WFH.”

    (As told to Anjali Venugopalan)
    (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
    The Economic Times

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