Pandemic Sparks Service Model Creativity – As Featured in Leader’s Edge Magazine
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COVID-19 pushed the work-from-home model forward at breakneck speed, but Patra kept pace.
If things had gone as Matthew Easterlin, Patra’s COO for international operations, had planned, around 3,200 Patra employees in India and the Philippines would have begun moving from brick and mortar offices to working from home slowly over the next few years. But the coronavirus changed all that.
“In the middle of February [2020], we realized we probably were going to have a very serious problem on our hands and started to prepare for a transition. We took employees from the traditional office setting, also known as a ‘hub’ model, and moved them to working from home, called ‘hub and spoke,’ because we knew those offices were going to have to be closed. We basically transitioned several thousand employees in a few weeks from traditional offices to work from home in both India and the Philippines,” Easterlin says.