When one works from home, a prolonged and frequent power outage can mean the end of it. Since the pandemic outburst, there has been an increase in power consumption with the outbreak of work from home culture.Goa has been witnessing constant power-cuts everyday across several parts, leaving work from home employees in stress, with no access to power backups or internet networks, that forces them to postpone important meetings and deadlines, thereby, decreasing their credibility and efficiency at work.Disruption in power supply has proven it’s ground on having negative affects on workflow, increasing customer dissatisfaction, rise in loss of revenue, damaging equipment’s, interrupting services and causing disappearance of data. Such disastrous occasions has hampered all work from home employees several times.Swizel Quadros, a Graphic Designer, from Curchorem, has faced several issues while working. She explains “Work from home may sound easy to many, but it’s not what it seems like specially with frequent, unannounced power-cuts. Being a Graphic Designer, my entire work relies on my system, which needs constant charging and when there is a prolonged power-cut, my system goes off that has resulted in loss of data. There have also been times when I had to literally spend an entire day in a café because of power shut downs.While she complains about the destruction that power shut downs have caused, Sarah Sheikh, residing in Arlem, working as a sales executive says “In my area, we face power issues and these disruptions often spoil our equipment’s and appliances. By far the biggest challenge is being able to rely on a stable electricity supply. There is no power stability guaranteed, particularly in my area. I really think to ease the work from home process its important to have some reliable source of power, since not everyone can afford to have expensive power back ups.”But not everyone in Goa face the problem of constant power outages, Sanket Vadgama, from Porvorim, an IT Engineer, finds it easier to the work from home environment. “I achieve a much better work-life balance working from home. Only when there are power cuts, I am not being able to complete the task before the deadlines which causes major hindrance to the work”.He elaborates “But whenever there was one, it was as equal to a nightmare, since we were not informed in prior so my devices lacked battery and eventually died.A great source of worry can be seen across the state due to power outages, posing a challenge to all employees working from home.Reliable electricity supply is very critical in developing societies, like ours, as we are heavily depended on gadgets to complete our day to day work. In an event of power outage, work is halted, effecting companies productivity and employees credibility.Therefore, there seems to be an urgent need to put in place affordable, quality and constant supply of power to protect the work from home employees, so that the work flow doesn’t suffer due to power-cuts.
