Medi Assist has had to adapt and pivot their operations swiftly in response to the changes imposed by the health risks of COVID-19, as well as the impact of the continuing business and travel restrictions within the Country. As we enter the start of an era of recovery, our leadership team has been asking itself how we should reimagine our organization to become stronger and more resilient in the future.

Our team is focused on finding:

1. Agile solutions for our employees,
2. Transforming our organizations amid the COVID-19 crisis, and
3. Leading many innovative efforts to speed up a return to work through a human-centric approach.

Everything we had talked about in our annual reviews, as a Company, came to the forefront – digitization, agility, resilience, and sustainability. What the pandemic did for organizations and for Medi Assist is to accelerate that future.

We see this tremendous business agility and personal agility everywhere. Since June 2020, our leadership executive committee had quick stand-up meetings every day (and now every week) to discuss the issues, prioritize, and move forward. It has been fascinating to see tomorrow’s ideas coming alive today e.g.

1. Communicating using all possible tools in this changed World.
2. Learning to work as a team without hierarchical or functional boundaries, and
3. Breaking through many of the silos that have seen in the past.

In every office across India, we’ve set up an incident-management team, which meets regularly. We’ve created a set of principles and given enough space for people to apply them locally. We’ve defined a return-to-workplace approach and we’ve developed in-house Newsletter focused on what’s going to happen i.e. What’s going to happen to hospitalization? What’s going to happen to Vaccination and Vaccine distribution?, How can we help our partners and members find a hospital bed? etc.

And then we became very aware of the different experiences our employees were having from home-schooling, loneliness, mental health, physical health and those who were just exhausted. Our focus today is about bringing all of that together to provide every person with the support he or she needs. It’s not been a one-size-fits-all approach.

The other areas that has changed for us is the amount of digitization we undertook during the Pandemic and our road ahead. Our point of view – after the Covid-19 Pandemic – that the world is going to become more flexible; the traditional models of employment are going to be broken; work as we know it is going to change.

For example, we are investigation the possibility of implementing a flexible work environment. People who have capacity could partner with us and say “Hey, I have time and am passionate about….” or “we could ask, “Hey, I’m looking for somebody who could give me 20 hours of work a week.”

Everything we’re thinking about—return to office, return to travel, return to some semblance of normalcy—is going to take a little longer than we thought. How are we thinking about this at Medi Assist?

1. The office is important, but you don’t need to be in the office five days a week.
2. People will come back to the office, whether it’s two days, three days, four days. It’s what we’re calling a hybrid work arrangement, with a physical workspace and a digital workspace.
3. We’re rethinking our physical workspace entirely to create more connections, more collaboration. We are also thinking about the digital workspace and how we can make that experience better – where we continue to work digitally but build in some of the social-rituals, as well.
4. Our leaders have seen that a new way of work is possible. This moment has helped change the mindset of our leaders to believe that this is possible. People have tasted something new, so they may be keener to try and make new ways of working.