Work From Home to End, List of Companies Ask People Back to Offices.

The Covid-19 pandemic is still raging across the world, the number of cases being reported in the country and the world has gone down substantially. The work from home -the concept that emerged out of this pandemic that has become a new normal. But now, in September, when India is doing record vaccination and when a large chunk of population has been inoculated, the corporations are asking their employees to come back to office and to either embrace the hybrid style of working, where one is expected to work for 2-3 days from home and work for next 2-3 days from office. In the list of the big corporations that are asking employees to start working from office are TCS, Wipro, Apple etc just to name a few.

Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji on Sunday said its leaders will start returning to office from Monday after 18 months of work from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “After 18 long months, our leaders @Wipro are coming back to the office starting tomorrow (twice a week). All fully vaccinated, all ready to go - safely and socially distanced," Premji said in a tweet. He also shared a video about the COVID-19-related safety protocols, including temperature checks and QR code scans, that have been put in place at the Wipro office.

Premji, during the company’s 75th annual general meeting on July 14, had said about 55 per cent of its employees in India have been vaccinated. Wipro has about two lakh employees currently.

India’s software giant is planning to call back over 80 per cent of employees to start working from office. The company said that it has almost 90 per cent of its employees getting vaccinated. Even TCS, CEO of TCS dropped enough hints about the company’s plan to get its maximum workforce back to office. “Depending on the Covid-19 third wave, sometime towards the end of 2021 or early next year, we will get 70-80 per cent of our workforce back in the offices,” Rajesh said.

The majority of the workforce that will be called back to offices will be fully vaccinated. TCS could be setting a new course for other top IT firms by calling the workforce back to the offices.  The company constitutes more than 10 per cent of India’s 4.6 million IT employees. TCS is planning to ask 80-90 per cent of its workforce to work from the office.

After TCS, another software company that is going to get back to pre-pandemic mode of working is Infosys. It is planning to reopen its offices and getting the employees back to work from the office only. The company is ensuring the safety of the 2.6 lakh employees it is planning to call to the office while keeping the threat of the third wave of the



pandemic in mind. After the second wave of the pandemic, the numbers are bit controlled and have reached the lowest. The health experts have advised to not lower the guards as the next wave is inevitable.

The company said, “We have been getting requests from certain accounts to allow their team members to work from Infosys campuses. In addition, some of our employees have also been asking to come back and start working from the office, as a personal preference."

Major IT services company HCL Tech is treading the same path as of its rivals, HCL Technologies Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Apparao V V said that currently, about 3 per cent of the employees in India are coming to the workplace, while others continue to work from home.

Moreover, the CHRO also informed that HCL expects to vaccinate 100 per cent of its employees in the ongoing quarter. Currently, about 74% of its employees have been inoculated. Moreover, in terms of employee headcount and attrition, HCL Tech said that at the end of the June 2021 quarter, the company had 1,76,499 employees. During the briefing, Apparao V V said that last year, the company had onboarded 14,600 freshers globally.

Another name that is in the list of the companies that has reopened its office for employees is IT and digital product engineering firm Nagarro. The company announced a few days back that it has re-opened its Gurgaon office for its employees. The company mentioned in its Linkedin post that “After 18 months of working from home, we can finally say something that many Nagarrians have long been waiting for! Yes, we are re-opening the Nagarro office in Gurgaon, India. Of course, with all Covid protocols in place.”

Nasscom, an Indian non-governmental trade association and advocacy group following the footsteps of the software giants has embraced the hybrid work model and after 1.5 years of remote work opens its offices for the employees to return. The company has announced that it has put in some strict covid protocols and will allow only less than 30 per cent occupancy in the office. Apart from this, contactless solutions, enhanced ventilation, maintaining social distancing norms and keeping vaccination in mind, are some of the stringent measures the company has taken to minimise the risk of contracting Covid-19.

Just like Nasscom and Naggaro, tech-giant Apple is also gearing up to open its offices for employees from this months in hybrid style. The company has said that its employees need to work for three days from the office. Apple CEO Tim Cook had already proposed the model back in June 2021.