The government on Tuesday said it has extended connectivity norms for work from home for IT and BPO companies till December 31. The time period for work from home was expiring on July 31. The Department of Telecommunications said in a late-night tweet on Tuesday, "DoT has further extended the relaxations in the terms and conditions for other service providers up to 31st December 2020 to facilitate work from home in view of the ongoing concern due to COVID-19." In March, the DoT relaxed certain norms for OSPs till April 30 to facilitate work from home (WFH) amid the coronavirus pandemic which was further extended till July 31.
Earlier, companies weren’t allowed to connect the office VPN network to a home infrastructure, which was then relaxed. The norms relaxed to facilitate work from home include the requirement of security deposit and agreement for WFH facility for IT and IT-enabled services.
Currently, around 85% of the IT workforce is working from home and only those performing critical functions are going to offices. Whether employees are allowed to work from home or when they will be asked to return to office will be at the discretion of the company.
Infosys has said that less than 1% of its workforce is working from office right now as the company works towards adopting a hybrid working model.
“Our effort and focus is mainly on an operating model that we can seamlessly swap between work from home and work from office,” COO Pravin Rao said when the company announced its Q1 results.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) too, has only 1% of the workforce globally currently working from office or customer locations, and expects 5% of people to return to offices globally by the end of the quarter.
“We want to be very conservative in bringing people to work. Our strategy varies depending on the COVID situation in each country and in each city,” ilind Lakkad, the Chief Human Resources Officer said.
Meanwhile at Wipro, 93% employees are working from home. But the company said that it may never return to a situation where 100% of the workforce is working 100% of the time from office.
With PTI inputs