“As communicated by CEO and chief human resources officer (CHRO) in various townhalls, it is mandatory for all associates to attend office on all the working days (5 days per week if there are no holidays) starting 1 October 2023,” reads the official mail.
However, the company in its response to CNBC-TV18 said, “As we are in the silent period at the moment, we will not be able to comment on your query.”
In its FY23 annual report, the company highlighted the importance of returning to the office. The report mentioned that over half of the company’s workforce was hired after March 2020, and new employees benefit from physical interactions with senior colleagues and leaders to acculturate and learn from their behaviors and ways of thinking.
“Without those interactions, employee engagement as well as acculturation got badly impacted. All these factors led us to gradually bring back people to our offices during the year,” company said in its FY23 annual report.
Notably, TCS allocates more than half of its revenue to meet its wage bill. In FY23, the company had spent as much 56.6 percent of revenue as employee benefit expenses. TCS is the largest private employer in India with a workforce of over six lakh (600,000) people as of March 2023, so this change in policy could potentially affect a large number of employees who will now be required to commute to the office.
Earlier, in May 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic, TCS’s then CEO, Rajesh Gopinathan, had introduced the “25×25 model,” which aimed to bring back 25 percent of the workforce to the office by the year 2025.
First Published: Sept 29, 2023 3:52 PM IST
