Andela Ready to Help Regions Struggle to Work Remotely

The massive shift to remote work caused by the coronavirus has exposed the limitations of some outsourced engineering businesses’ ability to cope with the change. There are reports that a lack of portable computing equipment, reliable internet access, and adequate security make it impossible for the employees of some firms to work from home under shelter in place conditions.“Millions of workers in India and the Philippines do everything from writing computer code to fielding customer calls for companies across the globe. Now, with the new coronavirus hitting, they have been sent home to work,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Client contracts have to be revised or suspended to allow work to be done outside the office.”A study by analyst firm Gartner found that 54 percent of the companies in India do not have enough technology and resources for employees to work at home. “These companies seem helpless due to old desktop-laptops, poor network connectivity, and UPS backup.”There have also been reports that some companies have been forcing employees to come to the office in violation of India’s mandated 21-day lockdown.We at Andela want to assure our partners that our engineering teams have all shifted to remote work in accordance with government requirements in the countries where we operate. This is in the best interests of our employees’ health and our partners’ business continuity.The shift was seamless. Andela’s teams are fully prepared for this kind of event because distributed engineering is our business. All of our engineers are equipped to work from their homes at any time. The measures listed below are standard for our developer teams.• All engineers work on Andela-provided MacBook pro laptops with remote wipe.• Andela has dedicated IT Security Teams that support our engineering organizations 24/7.• Because Andela teams are embedded within our partner organizations, our security team implements any partner-specific security measures to ensure compliance with internal policies.• All Andela engineers are provided with a stipend to use as needed to ensure that they have the high-speed Internet, auxiliary power, or coworking space (when available again), and anything else they might need to work at home.• In addition to technical support, Andela has established best practices for distributed development. All of our employees are fluent in remote tools and communications practices, and U.S. businesses are guaranteed a minimum of five hours of overlap with the remote team regardless of the time zone.Andela’s business model is not that of traditional IT outsourcing that is largely based on low-cost labor. Andela’s distributed engineering model emphasizes providing U.S. companies with access to talented engineers regardless of the employee’s location. Our engineers work directly with our partners as extensions of their internal development teams. We have invested in the infrastructure and business processes to make these relationships personal, seamless, and reliable.If your engineering projects have been impacted by the ability of outsourced engineers to work at home, Andela is available to support you for interim or long term projects. To learn more about Andela’s remote engineering model, download the e-book “How to Scale Your Engineering Team with a Growth Framework.”