Work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing employers and employees to wake up to a new scenario. Employees are able to work from home for most part while employers are finding it a great alternative. The idea around working from a remote location is not new but work from home is becoming a new landscape. Globally, it seems tech companies are willing to let their employees continue with current practice. Twitter and Square are so ahead of the curve that they are letting employees work from home permanently.
In other words, Twitter and Square employees may not return to office once shelter-in-place restrictions are lifted by authorities. Facebook, on the other hand, wants to gradually move its workforce to remote and work from home scenarios. Google and Microsoft seem to be on the fence here. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has emerged as a vocal critic of the situation. He believes work from home will not be right to gauge burnout and mental health of employees.
This duopoly in ideology and strategy is playing out in India as well. IT Services giant Infosys and TCS are on the parallel path when it comes to long-term strategy. Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani and CEO Salil Parekh believe working from office helps build social capital. TCS, on the other hand, plans to allow 75 percent of its employees to work from home by 2025. The idea seems to be identical to the strategy adopted by Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg
“We were able to work remotely because of the social capital that various teams have built from years of working together in the office. They know and trust each other. While it is important to continue working from home till there is a medical breakthrough, once things are better we should look at rebuilding social capital. Underestimating the value of that will cause problems for companies,” Salil Parekh told ET NOW in an interview.
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TCS says that every employee can work without spending more than 25 percent of their time in a TCS office. In the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic, Indian IT companies got millions of their employees to work from home. However, it seems like not everyone of them will have the option to switch to the new normal permanently. While Infosys co-founders make a valid point, the post COVID work would be vastly different and the advantages of working from office won’t outweigh that of working from home.