Embracing flexibility with work: A new era for India's workforce

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Steel Authority of India (SAIL), a steel behemoth, and Infosys, the iconic IT services company? They are as different as chalk and cheese, but, interestingly, both are getting more flexible about their workplace policies and, in the process, paving the way to explore new work models for organisations. In May, SAIL announced the Work from Other than Workplace (WoW) policy. Under this policy, employees could choose to work from a place other than their normal office/base location.

Generally, we don’t expect such flexibility from a typical public sector company. On the other hand, in June, Infosys was in the news, as it announced a series of financial incentives to its employees to move to Hubbali, the well-known tier 2 town in Karnataka. This was a conscious push towards encouraging work from other than Bengaluru.

Both these seemingly unrelated policy events are signalling a new future for how India Inc. has been looking at work and workplaces. In fact, behind all the return-to-office mandates grabbing media headlines periodically, there is fine print about how the companies are asking people to come to the office only for a few days.

Much of the knowledge sector work globally has already moved to hybrid work, an arrangement that legitimises remote work and presents an acceptable mechanism for our needs to socialise in offices, periodically. A recent study by recruitment agency CIEL HR showed that six out of 10 technology companies have adopted hybrid work, with employees going to the office for only a few days a week. The covid pandemic gave us a first-hand experience of how work can be freed from the rigidities of time and place and yet remain productive.