For many employees in India, the typical work week begins with a long commute into an expensive city. Once there, they stay at a hostel or apartment for the week with little technical infrastructure and few amenities. The end of the work week brings the long drive back home for the weekend before starting it over again.
Vee Healthtek looks to change that office commute with the introduction of our “Vee Hive” concept. The Vee Hive is a series of work/life complexes placed in rural areas across India. These standalone facilities will have living quarters for employees and dedicated, secure office facilities.
These locations will provide many benefits to both the employee and to Vee Healthtek, including:
The office commute has already undergone dramatic changes in the last year due to the global pandemic. Many companies were pushed into a work from home environment due to the country wide lockdowns. In many cases, we see this as a permanent change for many employees.
But working from home isn’t the answer for every employee. Many end-client security requirements require work to return to the office environment post-pandemic. At-home infrastructure can be a challenge since low bandwidth and power reliability can have a big impact on productivity.
Employee morale can be lower for staff who crave the face-to-face contact of being in a group environment. You also have the potential for lost opportunities for collaboration that can lead to innovation and the development of best practices.
The Vee Hive concept allows us to place the facilities where the resources are located. We can review the home locations of current staff and target a location closer to their area to reduce their commute time. Or, we can target new sources of employees by placing a location in areas that have high populations of experienced resources.
If we need to expand our medical billing resources, we can target an area that is plentiful in these resources. If we need medical coders, we can place a new Vee Hive in a different area. This expands our pool of available candidates and allows us to ramp up new projects quicker.
The typical employee in India spends about 30% of their salary on rent. By placing the Vee Hives in rural areas, we have found that the construction costs for these facilities is about equal to the cost of expanding our facilities located in the major cities.
Because of this, we are able to offer free and subsidized rent to employees. This is a huge recruiting tool for acquiring new talent and a tremendous benefit to employees.
Vee Hives are designed to provide high-speed telecommunications to the entire complex — much faster than the typical home environment. The facilities are configured to support a healthy life-work balance with lots of open space to walk, play, and keep fit.
Living areas are completely secure with multiple levels of security. In addition, all the people living in the complex will be company employees, so this will provide instant bonding opportunities with your neighbors as well as providing peace of mind knowing that you aren’t living next to complete strangers.
Dining options located onsite will be available at subsidized costs, and each location will have entertainment rooms available for movies, games, and gatherings.
Security is a critical aspect of everything we do at Vee Healthtek. This has never been as critical as it is today with the ongoing cyber-attacks and ransomware situations. The Vee Hive locations will have highly secure office space in each complex.
These ISO-27001 and SSAE-18 certified facilities will have all the same security components found in our larger city-based facilities, just on a smaller scale. Instead of supporting 1,000+ employees, these office environments will be configured for 50-100 employees. The office locations will all have physical security, CCTV cameras, and lockers outside for storage of personal items, including cellphones. Each workstation will be configured with high-powered computers with large dual monitors.
Secure high-speed bandwidth connections will provide fast tunnels into our corporate data center. Conference rooms and training areas will provide continued learning opportunities. Backup generators will provide consistent power to the location. An additional benefit of the geographic diversity these locations provide is it limits the impact of a localized force majeure event. Only a small portion of the workforce will be impacted, and tasks can be picked up in other locations.
With some of the best employee retention rates in the industry, we expect this new offering to continue to elevate employee retention. A stable employee base is key to providing exceptional quality levels to our clients.
Our first Vee Hive location is set to go into live production in July 2021. This facility is located in the city of Trichy, India, which is about 100 miles from one of our major operations centers in Salem, India. Initial capacity will be for 40 employees, with an expansion to 100 planned.
The Vee Hive concept allows Vee Healthtek to expand resources rapidly while still providing the secure office environment that is critical to our client’s compliance and security teams.