Remember this man – his name is Rajesh Gopinathan, Chairman of TCS, and he is about to turn the way we work upside down – permanently!
India’s biggest IT firm, TCS, is set to shake up the global IT industry employment practices – and maybe start a global revolution in how we work.
Post-coronavirus, TCS has announced it will not go back to the old way, launching instead a new model called 25/25 using what is called Secure Borderless Work Spaces (SBWS).
Running up to 2025, TCS will ask a vast majority of 75% of its 450,000 employees globally to work from home, up from the industry average of 20% today.
TCS will discard its 20-year-old operating model and leapfrog into a new mode of work.
Others will have to follow. For a start, how will they compete for the best recruits? And how else will they achieve productivity gains?
The new model called 25/25 will require far less office space than occupied today. “We don’t believe that we need more than 25% of our workforce at our facilities in order to be 100% productive,” says TCS’s chief operating officer NG Subramaniam (pictured below).
TCS is something of a bellwether among India’s IT services firms, so Wipro, Infosys and others will likely follow.
Experts say before the lockdown no more than 15-20% of employees ever worked from home among the Indian services firms.
I have been on some of the Indian IT “campuses” – huge sites usually on the edge of the city in a park-like area with multiple buildings, lifestyle facilities and essentially a “living away from home” model for thousands of employees.
All this will change – and fast.
Into India 