India’s largest private sector employer Tata Consultancy Services seems to be having second thoughts about its ambitious hybrid, work from home programme.
The company, which had announced in 2020 that only 25% of its employees would need to work from the office at any given time by 2025, has asked all of its employees to report to the office for work.
“We are asking people to come all days in a week,” said Milind Lakkad CHRO of TCS.
His statement comes in the wake of widespread reports about new employees failing to “connect” with their organization and its culture. This has been blamed on the culture of work from home which has been alleged to have prevented employees from “absorbing” the culture of their organization
Among those who have come out strongly against prolonged work from home is Jamie Dimon, CEO of the world’s most valued bank, JP Morgan.
Dimon went to the extent of hinting that those who don’t want to come back to office should look for alternate employment. Like many others, he blames remote work for lowering the quality of work and standing in the way of true collaboration and idea generation.
Indian companies have also expressed similar concerns, and Lakkad hinted that TCS was keen on increasing employees' connect with the organization.
This has especially been a problem in the last two years as many freshers who joined during the pandemic have not been sufficiently immersed in the culture of work.
It is seen to have led to problems such as low professional commitment, lack of punctuality and a lack of stickiness and loyalty from the part of the employee towards the organization. Young employees are also been seen as having failed to benefit from the guidance and mentoring of their seniors.
Therefore many organizations are keen on bringing back their entire workforce, including the older ones and younger staff, to the office to rekindle collaboration, mentoring and work culture.
Lakkad also indicated that TCS is also seeing the problem from a similar angle and pointed out that the company has hired over a lakh young employees since the pandemic began.
“We have hired a large number of people in the last three years. For most of the period they were working in the hybrid/ virtual mode. They need to come to work so that the new workforce gets integrated with the larger workforce of TCS.
“That is the only way they will learn and understand and internalize the TCS values and the TCS way. That is the only way they will learn and understand and internalize TCS values,” he said.
Companies seem open to relaxing the work from office requirements once the work culture is back in place.
“We will continue to assess and evolve depending on what’s best for our customer and our employees,” Lakkad added.
Besides TCS, other IT firms such as HCL Tech and Wipro have also rolled back their work from home allowances.