As per the reports, Indian second highest market cap company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has decided to end its work from home policy and has extended the deadline by a quarter to its staff to return to office. The company would now extend the March end as the last date for its employees to resume responsibilities from office.
The Chief Operating Officer, NG Subramaniam, has warned that incompliance of this decree would lead to serious repercussions. This is coming in the light of the fact that bringing the employees back to office has become an industry-wide struggle.
Contemporaries of TCS have also been facing similar issues in increasing the foot traffic on their office campuses. Many of the organizations have developed a roster system which mandates up to three days in the workplace.
Final Deadline to Resume Work from Office
Citing reasons like work culture and security concerns as one of the reasons behind this stringent deadline, he added that working from home makes the employees as well as employers more vulnerable. He said that “We are exercising patience but have taken the principled stand that employees have to get back to offices. We have sent employees the final communication on this, and if they do not, there will be consequences to face.”
Adding the security part of the decision, he said that the with the kind of ongoing cyberattacks, the businesses are at risk and it is not possible to have this control at home setting and hence there can be security risks to businesses.
Original TCS Culture
Adding the reasons like original culture, the COO emphasized on getting the original culture back since around 40000 employees joined online as well as quit the company online and this left no space for offline interaction. Adding that this situation does not help the organization, he said that remote working cannot help in creating a great working culture for any organization.
Subramaniam, while underlining the importance of face to face interactions, said that in order to make leadership calls, an organization can only build talent pool when there is face to face interaction. He said that TCS is not in business so that employees use it as a Launchpad. He cited that remote working cannot help a company to make a great culture.
Chief HR Officer, Milind Lakkad had previously reverberated the same views while at company’s third quarter earnings’ conference wherein he said that the company expects to be back to its “normal operating mode by the end of the current fiscal year”.