Indian IT giants ponder WFH strategies

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s top IT companies have been operating almost exclusively in a remote working mode, with over 90% of employees from TCS, Infosys and Wirpo working from home.

Moving forward, and as lockdown measures continue to be eased, will these companies continue to implement work-from-home (WFH) policies?

TCS, for one, is making WFH a permanent goal. The company aims to have 75% of its employees working from home by 2025, while the rest of their workforce will work from office for only 25% of the time.

Describing how TCS has “invested significantly” into WFH, N Chandrasekaran, chairman of TCS, said that the WFH shift imposed by COVID-19 has come at a significant cost for the company and is no longer considered a short-term measure for TCS.

 READ: Indian workers staying at home despite easing of lockdown

For Infosys, while there is no urgency to bring employees back to the workplace as 95% of its employees continue to exercise WFH, the longer-term target is to introduce a hybrid model, where the workforce is divided between WFH and the office.

Pravin Rao, COO of Infosys, explained, “What we are looking at is a model, where some of our employees will continue to work from home and others in office. But it is too early to say how many will work from office in the future.”

Of less ambiguity perhaps, is how the model of work has changed forever, suggested Rishad Premji, chairman of Wirpo.

“We will never go back fully to the old ways of working. We will increasingly leverage more technology to onboard, induct, train and engage with our employees, and our workforce will never come back to a 100% work from office mode,” he added.