Remote work that kept companies afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic has now fallen out of favour of corporate czars. HR managers of various big corporations have issued return-to-office mandates and are exerting pressure on employees to be present in offices. In the post-pandemic world, companies are eager to return to the pre-2020 working norms as they brace for an economic downturn.
The latest to do so is e-commerce giant Amazon which has mandated managers to sack employees if they don’t attend office three times a week. Earlier, banking majors JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had issued directives to do away with hybrid mode and want employees to attend office on all five working days of a week.
Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services in June scrapped work from home and wants its employees to be present in the office five days a week.
Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy also has a dim view of letting employees work from home and feels it leads to the waning of institutional culture. Regarding the Indian context, Murthy said the WFH system does not work as people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.
However, Infosys has not totally scrapped work from home option, though it claims that the number of employees attending office was steadily increasing. It claimed as many as 70% of its employees are on campus at any given point in the week.
Boost to Collaboration
The reasons being cited by various companies for bringing people back to the office include productivity, collaboration, training, and networking. Managers feel that face-to-face interactions improve camaraderie among employees and boost collaborative efforts. On the other hand, remote work runs the risk of employees working in silos.
The other reasons include lack of supervision and training, especially for younger employees. This could seriously affect their learning curve.
Lastly, there is the overhead expenses like real estate. Many of these companies have continued paying rents and leases for the office space even during lockdowns.
Interestingly, Tesla and X chairman Elon Musk has even added a dimension of morality to this issue. He observed that working from home was possible only for a certain set of white-collar employees, while others had no choice but to attend office. Hence he felt that remote work was ‘morally wrong’.
WFH as a Saviour
When the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic made us hunker down in our homes to duck the invisible virus, and the governments imposed lockdowns to contain its spread; employers and managers saw remote work as the go-to option to keep their businesses running.
While industries like software have used this option on a limited scale in the past, for others such as banking, insurance, and publishing it was a headlong plunge into unchartered waters with too many imponderables.
This unplanned experiment, thrust upon them by the virus, forced them to shift work from office premises to the 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study tables doubling up as a home office. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and Slack messenger provided the tenuous link in the socially distanced world to keep the offices ticking.
Once the teething troubles such as lack of enough laptops, ensuring data safety and patchy internet connections at the homes of employees were sorted, the companies found the going smooth with not much dent in productivity. While the pandemic was raging, TCS even announced its 25 by 25 vision - under which only 25% of the workforce would work out of office by the year 2025. However, this year the plan was given a quiet burial.
This eagerness to call back employees triggered an exodus among the women staff at TCS. For the first time, women employees leaving the company outnumbered their male counterparts. The company, however, decided to stick to its return-to-office policy.
Survey Narratives
Before the pandemic, remote work was looked down upon by most managers. They saw it as the first refuge of slackers and used to sanction it with much reluctance, and most companies had a monthly cap on WFH.
However, the pandemic ensured that WFH was the only way out and skeptics were forced to list out its virtues. Many research organizations came out with surveys stating that remote work had not affected productivity and the work-life balance of the employees had improved. Though some of them claimed that employees were complaining of longer working hours.
Once the virus was gone for good, the surveys began to sing a different tune. They began to list out the ills, including low productivity, longer turnaround time, employee tendency to procrastinate, and lack of supervision and mentoring of new employees.
