Wipro Chairman Want Employees Back To Office For 2 'Important' Reasons: Details Here

As working professionals have adjusted to the new work from home crisis due to the pandemic, Wipro chairman Rishad Premji said he would personally want people to come back to office and work. 

At a time when nearly 98 percent of Wipro's employees continue to work from home amid COVID-19 pandemic, Rishad Premji shared two important reasons as this will help build culture and foster innovation. 

According to Times Now report, currently, less than 2 percent of its employees ( approximately 3,000) out of 1.85 lakh employees come to Wipro office, while others work from home. Also as per government orders, Wipro is not opening up till September or might extend to December.

Recently, during a conversation with Chiratae Ventures founder and chairman Sudhir Sethi, as part of VC fund's visionary talk series, Premji said "Customers have been incredibly supportive. The government has been incredibly supportive in terms of providing relaxation on rules and requirements that you have to work from SEZ units. We are having more conversations with the government as to how we can make this a permanent feature. We will never go back to a hundred per cent of the old model actually. Equally, I personally am of the view that we want people to come back, so we will never have anybody working from home all of the time. Equally, we would have all of our people working from home some of the time."

Further on this approach, Premji asserted that he wanted people to come back and work from office for two main reasons- culture and innovation. 

"We want people to come back to build culture, right? I'm spending a lot of time personally, over the last six months on culture. And the reality is culture grows by osmosis. Culture grows by people engaging at the ward coffee machine, or the water cooler, gossiping about the organization, exchanging notes. That's a very core part of how things build and grow. And it's equally very important for innovation. See, the challenge with these kinds of conversations is that you can have them effectively. You can have them, but you can't have them informally. They're very structured. You know you don't banter. You don't take 30 minutes off to just sit and think, and suddenly something strikes you, right? For innovation. I think it's powerful for people to come together. Oftentimes, innovation happens in the downtime when you don't expect something to come about and something comes about. So for those two reasons, I think it's important that people come back," Premji added.  

Pointing over Wipro's set ratio as to how many employees would work from the office and home. He said "I don't know how much we'll be back. Maybe we go back to say 60 percent to 80 percent something in that range. I don't know yet, but certainly, we won't be at, I don't think it's in the foreseeable future that we have 75 percent of our people working from home and definitely not everybody working from home. Everybody will come in some of the time."

Currently, more than 95 percent of employees at India's top five IT companies continue to work from home.