According to a report published in Business Today, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will ask 75 percent of its 4.48 lakh employees to work from home by 2025.
- The new secure borderless workspaces (SBWS) model has improved the company’s velocity by 25%. It means that TCS could shift to WHM as a ‘New-Normal’ once lockdown opens.
- Over the past few weeks, TCS claims that they don’t need to have more than 25% of their workforce in the office in order to be 100% productive.
- TCS also believes that 25% of the project team may not be located in one single location.
- According to Gopinathan, this does not mean that people will lose their jobs.
The company’s CEO, Rajesh Gopinathan believes that the crisis has actually been good as it forced them to shift to the next phase of their operating model, which is Work from Home (WFH).
Running up to 2025, TCS will ask a vast majority of 75% of its 4.48 lakh employees globally (including 3.5 lakh in India) to work from home, up from the industry average of 20% today. The new model called 25/25 will require far less office space than occupied today.
TCS’s Chief Operating Officer, NG Subramaniam says “We don’t believe that we need more than 25% of our workforce at our facilities in order to be 100% productive”
He added that each employee should spend only 25% of his working time in office. This will also imply that of all the team members, only 75% of a project team may be in a single location and the rest will be dispersed across geographies.
This decision came after TCS briskly moved 90% of its 4,48,000 employees post-lockdown to an operating model it calls Secure Borderless Work Spaces (SBWS). In a letter to employees, TCS CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan wrote SBWS had seen 35,000 meetings, 406000 calls, and 340 lakh messages across TCS on the digital collaboration platform.
TCS has invested in creating SBWS over the past few years. “We have come out stronger and our model is more proven than ever before,” TCS’s CEO and MD Rajesh Gopinathan says.
Rajesh says it is not about moving the person out from the office and giving access to the laptop and desktop in the house to connect. It is much more than that. “It is about taking the entire element of the operating model and being able to deploy that into this kind of an extended environment we call SBWS.”
He added that the firm has rejigged its cybersecurity posture, project management practices, and systems to ensure proper work allocation, work monitoring, and reporting to ensure the quality and security of the projects was not compromised.
Experts said, TCS is taking the lead, other Indian IT companies will have no option but to follow suit as the lessons learned from lockdown spark a more rapid and widespread “virtualisation” of business practices.
Several surveys conducted over the last month have also indicated that CEOs believe a fifth of staff will move to working from home in a post-Covid world.
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