With top IT companies seeing about 55%-65% of their employees working from office on a regular basis, companies have been ramping up their office space to accommodate the increased workforce, which grew further during Covid.
As many of them gave up space during the pandemic, the existing office capacity for several of them got lesser than pre-Covid times. While their office capacity fell during those two years, their hiring was on record due to the secular shift towards digitalisation and cloud of enterprises during the pandemic.
The top four IT companies, despite seeing a whopping 50,000 fall in their employee headcount in the last one year, still have about 150,000 employees more than their pre-pandemic level.
And with firms mandating the gradual end of work from home, a slew of new office spaces opened up in the last one year. Infosys added office facilities not only in places like Yelahanka (Bengaluru), Vizag and Nagpur, but even in Bulgaria. While Wipro, HCLTech and LTIMindtree expanded their nearshore centres last year, midcaps like Persistent Systems, Birlasoft and Happiest Minds opened centres in cities like Kolkata, Coimbatore, Madurai and Pune. Sonata and LTTS also consolidated their office spaces into bigger workspaces.
Venkatraman Narayanan, MD and CFO, Happiest Minds, said, “Many IT companies gave up additional space during Covid. People are now coming back to office regularly and what’s driving fear is if all the employees come back together, where will they sit? Look at my own case. I’ve got more space than what I want in Bengaluru. But in Pune, I’m running exactly at capacity. But if everybody decides to come to work at the same time, I may be short by about 50-60 seats in Pune”.
With space crunch in many offices, hot desking has gained currency in many companies. The concept of permanent workstation or permanent desk has ended in many places. With hot desking, employees can use desks as per requirement by booking in advance.
An employee of a top tier IT firm told FE that while in some locations, employees can book a workstation 3-4 days in advance, in other places like Synergy park, Deccan park and Waverock in Hyderabad, where occupancy is very high, they need to book 15-30 days in advance. The massive hiring done by IT companies when they were working remotely is creating difficulty for all to accommodate everyone back in office.