Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: While Information Technology (IT) majors have relaxed Covid-19 pandemic restrictions and reopened their offices for all staff, the millennial generation, enjoying the flexibility of work and life, seems no longer ready to return to official workstations.
Their flexibility to balance work and life also gave them an opportunity to ‘moonlight’ and earn an extra buck, something they might not do once they returned to their official workstations.
In fact, moonlighting has emerged as a key problem for many IT companies, and firms like TCS, Wipro, and Infosys have warned their employees against it.
According to the media reports, Indian IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is facing a tough time recalling its millennial employees back to the offices as it plans to end the work-from-home arrangement introduced because of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Last year, the company announced a 25/25 model, which was to be implemented by 2025. It wanted a quarter of its employees to work from the office, on a rotation basis, until 2025. And the employees will not need to spend over 25 percent of their time at work. Within the project teams, only 25 percent of employees could be co-located.
However, the company now wants all the employees to return to the office before it transitions to the new model in a phased manner.
“Customers have visited our offices and labs and while we see the views of the youngsters about having flexibility, customers’ requirements, choices, compliance risks, and regulations also have to be considered,” a media report quoted TCS Chief Operating Officer (COO), N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, as saying.
Until now, less than 20 percent of TCS employees (from about six lakh) have returned to work from the office as the company tries to lure them back with nostalgic pictures on its social media handles, the reports said.
The move to defer the hybrid work plan to 2025 instead of implementing it immediately is becoming a vital issue. Millennials, who form 70 percent of the TCS workforce and had returned to their hometowns to save on travel and residential costs amid the pandemic, are opposing it.
TCS argues that remote work cannot be a sole arrangement.
Our view is that we can’t have new joiners not seeing a TCS office or interacting with role models as mentors. Remote working as the only goal will lead to a very transactional experience which is neither in the organization’s interest nor these young professionals, as they will miss out on gaining holistic professional growth, he said.
TCS recruited nearly 100,000 people in 2021, with several joining the company remotely, and many of them quit this year without ever attending the TCS office.