Great management, but no one wants to see your point of view - Associate Software Engineer PayU Employee Review

1. I am working as an Associate Software Engineer under a senior engineering manager 2. I have gone to office a few times but I will point it out very honestly that whenever I have tried to do "Teams" meetings in office, I am not at all able to concentrate as there are other distractions like people who are sometimes talking or roaming or attending meetings. Moreover the work that I could have easily done in that time had I been at home/remote office is basically postponed to the time when I have to return home and do it. 3. Second point here is that I am able to deliver much more and communicate and discuss more clearly when I am on a teams call at home with a closed working space with no disturbance. 4. As a software engineer, most of the work that we do is as an independent contributor hence personally I need a lot of concentration time alone to design, develop and write code. 5. I think office is a great fun place but for the role that I am in, I need some time alone in my room to do my work rather than in an open cubicle where anyone can come and disturb at anytime. This hampers productivity a lot and in my nxt point I make an argument that is based on a Stanford study which clearly shows that when employees were given the right to choose their own work location, a company's profit went up by 2000$ per employee which was a huge increment of 24% and attrition went down drastically. The company was also able to save a lot on renting extra office spaces which made profits even bigger 6. There have been instances where I have felt that there is a strong need for companies to give flexibility to people to work from wherever they need to and not just the office compulsorily. I would encourage everyone to view this Stanford Ted talk where things are explained in great detail some of which I explained in the previous point : . Please check YouTube for a ted talk video titled "tell your boss you're working from home" 7. Attending office once in a while for collaboration, having fun, playing games and talking is great and really appreciable but when the work angle comes into the picture I do not think it is conclusive that office fosters a lot of productivity which working remotely doesn’t, because it is a highly subjective thing and depends on the individual, what type of role they are in and whether or not they can deliver more and have more productivity at a particular working place. I feel a lot more distracted and my whole day is spent talking to people about non-work related things and just playing table tennis and roaming around here and there. 8. Binding employees and forcing them to office for 2 minimum days is not something that an ideal company would do. When we see companies like Razorpay or Atlassian who tell employees to come 1 week in a quarter or work remotely and still have better work done is something that we can learn from. Forcing employees just creates a negative mindset for the employee and has its own effect on productivity and deliverables. Flexibility to work from anywhere and not forcing employees to come to office gives us a sense of belief in the CLT and the fact that the trust they show on us automatically then gets converted into better work done. 9. If you give the flexibility to work from anywhere you will attract and retain the best talent which will eventually reduce attrition, and this is not a baseless argument as I have done my analysis very carefully regarding the people who left PayU since July, almost all of them have joined companies for flexibility of work, and these are people who held very important positions in their teams, like