33% Employees of Top IT Firm to Work From Home Permanently

After Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced that a whopping 75% of its 4.48 lakh employees globally will work from home by 2025, top excecutive at Infosys has said that 33% of the company's workforce will work from home permanently.

"Once things are normal, over a period of time, probably 50 per cent of employees will come to office and the rest will work from home. Moving on, 66 per cent will be in office but 33 per cent will work permanently from home," Richard Lobo, Executive Vice President, Head HR, Infosys told Business Today. That translates to around 80,000 of its 2,42,371 employees globally to be working from home permanently.

"A large proportion of our people will continue to work from home or work remotely. Though, it will not always be the same set of people. I don't see any shift in that because people have now become used to it across the world." he added.

However, he did not specify the timeline by which the plan will come into force. "We don't have a timeline to share because it depends largely on how the disease  goes and I can't predict that path."

Infosys currently has around 5% of its employees going to office for work in India while the rest are working from home. 

Lobo further said the COVID-19 triggered lockdown has broken several mental barriers that it will reduce work productivity or efficiency of employees. "Covid has shown every industry can do it. Fortunately, we are in one of those industries that can support large amount of population to work from home," he said.

In the press conference after the Q4 results on April 20, Infosys COO Pravin Rao said, "We have not seen any loss in productivity since people have got used to it. So I think people are getting adjusted and in some sense our belief is once things come back, I do not know whether it will come back to the same normal, it may be a new normal and there will always be some element of work from home."