Infosys may just become the latest company to build in work from home as a long-term plan to have its employees work from home, rather than as a short-term measure due to the pandemic.
In an interview with Business Today, the IT major’s Head of HR and Executive Vice President Richard Lobo said that over time they expect about 50% of employees to work from home when things start returning to normal, and as things stabilise and a new normal is established, 66% of employees will be at office and the remaining at home. The report states that Infosys currently has 2.42 lakh employees, which means about 80,000 employees will effectively be working from home.
“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 said.
The company currently does not have any timeline on the same.
As of now, 5% of Infosys’ workforce goes to office, while the rest are working from home.
Earlier, Infosys CEO Salil Parekh had said that the company was able to move to a remote working model extremely fast and is now looking at how some of these aspects can be part of the company’s medium and long term vision.
However, it will have to be more careful about the security aspect with no lapse there, he had earlier said.
This would be the second IT major to build working from home into their practices. Earlier, Tata Consultancy Services COO NG Subramaniam had said that 75% of their employees would be working from home by 2025, and that they do not need more than 25% of their employees at their facilities to be fully productive.
During the company’s annual general meeting, Chairman N Chandrasekaran called this a “guesstimate”, and said that when they say 25% by 2025, it was not a target, but the direction they are heading in.
“We anticipate and predict that the world will move in this direction, and we want to be prepared for it. It is not (may not be) the same 25% of employees as well. It’s just a guesstimate, and could be 40-70%,” he said.