Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is encouraging its employees to return to offices and has ruled out a scenario where employees could work 100% remotely, a top executive said.
“There is a greater realisation that by coming to offices, more things get done, especially for people who have joined us in the last two years. When they come and see the offices, they see a different perspective of TCS, they see a different perspective of their own position vis-a-vis their peers,” N Ganapathy Subramaniam, chief operating officer at TCS, said in an interview.
TCS believes there is a general interest among employees to come to the office, though at this point, the company is not making it mandatory due to some fears around a fresh Covid wave. “At this stage, we are exercising certain amount of discretion because some people have fears of coming to office because of an impending Covid wave or whatever you want to call it. But at the same time, many have realised that we need to coexist,” Subramaniam said.
During the latter half of last year, TCS had informed its employees via internal emails that they would need to work from the office three days a week, according to the roster set by their supervisors.
Currently, employees are coming to the office on a need basis. “Some people are coming three days a week while some are coming all five days a week…it depends on the role they perform. There are projects we execute which as per the customer’s requirement, need to be executed completely only from office. So, there are projects like that which involves a lot of customer data, a lot of analytics, etc,” said Subramaniam.
Currently, employees are working in a mixed environment of office and home based on the work requirements. “We are giving the flexibility to our employees. But our thinking is that we need to evolve this hybrid model of work, making sure that people do come to office, people do experience it. 100% working from home is kind of ruled out. We expect them to come to office more often and as often as required to experience offices and for their own benefit of learning and sharing,” Subramaniam said.
During the peak of the pandemic in 2020, TCS had announced a 25×25 work model where it envisaged that by year 2025, no more than 25% of its employees would need to be at a TCS facility at any given point in time, and no individual would have to spend more than 25% of their time at a TCS facility to be 100% productive.