Hot desking, hyperlocal hubs: What return to office will look like for techies

Saranya (last name withheld), a techie, cannot wait to go back to office after working from home since March 2020. With a toddler at home, it hasn’t been easy balancing work and home activities.

Vinod (last name withheld), who works for a top IT firm, initially enjoyed WFH but is now eager to get back to campus and catch up with his teammates.

Their wait might end soon as IT companies prepare to bring employees back to the office in a phased manner. Over the past few weeks, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro have indicated when they expect employees to return to the office as more of them get vaccinated and case numbers come down, especially in cities such as Bengaluru.

When they return to the office twice or thrice a week, many IT and tech employees will likely not get a dedicated workspace. The norm will be hot desking – grabbing seats on a first-come, first-served basis.

They may not have to go to large campuses but opt to work in small, hyperlocal hubs to cut down travel time. With a portion of employees working remotely full time, video conference tools Zoom and Microsoft Teams will probably be a permanent setting.

This is probably how the future of work will look for IT and tech companies in India after 18 months of working from home. WFH was a necessity for the 4.5 million tech workforce in the country when the pandemic hit in March 2020.

As Sachin Tikekar, president of KPIT Technologies, an automotive engineering service company, put it, “Frankly speaking, some of our employees are sick of sitting at home” and companies are putting down plans to get employees back.

This is not the first time that the companies are preparing for the return-to-office transition. As the number of cases came down in late 2020 and early 2021, companies such as HCL Technologies and KPIT Technologies put in place frameworks to get employees back to the office. However, those efforts went for a toss as the second wave struck and companies went back to WFH mode.

Now, while companies are aware of a potential third wave, they also want to get employees to the office gradually.

Inoculation of employees is in full swing. TCS expects to get all employees vaccinated by September. Bengaluru-based Infosys has vaccinated 58 percent of its employees with the first dose and 10 percent with both doses.

Wipro has vaccinated about 35,000 employees. Chairman Rishad Premji said at the company’s annual general meeting on July 14 that almost 55 percent of the employees in India have been vaccinated. He did not specify if they were first doses or both. The company has 200,000 employees currently.

HCL Tech has vaccinated 70 percent of the employees and is looking to inoculate its entire workforce by this quarter.

Mindtree, L&T Technology Services and KPIT Technologies are accelerating the vaccination drive to get a majority of their employees inoculated.

VV Apparao, chief human resources officer at HCL Tech, said during a recent earnings call, “We do believe some amount of action is required since it has been 18 months since the people have been working from home.”

The company has started identifying roles where interaction and data protection are required, which means they have to be in a secured place. However, he did not share a timeline. HCL Tech did not respond to queries on what the future workplace would look like.

TCS plans to get employees to office by September. Infosys said it will be in the next 6-9 months. TCS and Infosys did not respond to questions on how the return to office would work for them in terms of shifts and workflows.

While Wipro will get the workforce slowly to office starting in September, it did not offer more details. According to sources, Wipro will start by getting employees in Bengaluru back to the office.

“Keeping the safety and wellbeing of our employees in mind, we have extended our work from home policy till August 31, 2021. We will take a decision on extending WFH closer to date and firm up our return to work policy in due course after taking into account the pandemic situation,” Wipro said in a statement.

Other IT and tech companies offered a little more insight into how the future of the workplace might look.

Tikekar of KPIT Technologies shared how the company had planned its future of work in December-January 2021, but had to abandon it due to the second wave.

The idea was to get employees into the office for two days a week. At any point of time, close to 40 percent of the employees would come to the office along with 10 percent who would come to the office every day.

“I don’t know to what extent this will be tweaked and I also want to know the pulse of the employees. We don’t want to take a decision in isolation and not be connected with reality,” he said.

The company employs over 6,500 people and 100 percent working from office is not feasible in light of the situation.

“Given the risk we continue to carry going forward, we want to remain flexible,” he said.

The company also plans to pilot programmes for full time remote employees, in small numbers, for specific engagements.

“If that works out, that can also become another model,” Tikekar said.

Hot desking will be commonplace. However, campuses will remain and the company will continue to invest in them, Tikekar said. But rapid expansion to new office spaces has been paused, executives pointed out.

Some companies are looking at hyperlocal workplaces. Sindhu Gangadharan, SAP Labs India’s managing director, spoke earlier about creating hyperlocal workspaces.

“So we will have the possibility of spaces, as we call it, where employees can come in and share experiences… The pattern will be hybrid in nature, where a significant majority will continue to work in hubs, which are close to giving the same experience like in the office, but you don’t need to necessarily come into the campus… it will give you everything that you need like access, connectivity and all the things that you need to do to work. So if people choose not to get into the campus, they still can go to these hubs. So that’s how we’re seeing this evolving, not just here in India, but also globally,” Gangadharan said.

While the company has not created such hubs yet, it is a concept the company is considering.