IT bellwether Infosys has said that it will explore a flexible hybrid work model for its employees starting from next year on account of the uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the company will allow employees to work from home or office depending on the situation. 

The company is likely to adopt the hybrid work model from next year when employees will not be required to be present in office on all days, for the next six months at least. Post June, the company will take a call on how to proceed depending on the pandemic situation and vaccination status. Infosys CEO & Managing Director Salil Parekh said during a virtual event that while the company has built a flexible model with regard to work from home, it is time to start work on building ‘social capital’.  

While stressing on social capital, Parekh said that flexibility will remain critical and the company will allow flexibility for employees to work from different locations at various times. "Having said that we also feel this whole concept of social capital is extremely important. We think that it is important as the Covid situation gets behind us, we start to create that social capital again so will have more and more work from the office environment as well. We have not decided the exact approach it will take," Parekh said. 

Krish Shankar, Executive Vice-President and Group Head of Human Resource Development, said it is likely in future that most companies will continue with the hybrid kind of work model, but it will differ according to the nature of work. 

Shankar added that the flexible work model will give an opportunity to more women, especially those who are engaged in caregiving roles at homes, to become part of the workforce. 

Infosys, which has over 2 lakh employees in India, currently has only 2% people working from office while the remaining 98% are working from home. 

Speaking at the virtual conference, Infosys Co-founder & Chairman Nandan Nilekani said, "We had invested in working from home as a concept for all our employees long before the pandemic. When the pandemic struck, it was very easy for Infosys relatively, to transition its 2,40,000 employees in 40 countries to work from home.”

Nilekani said that the investment in technology, network and cyber security framework were the enabling factors to facilitate work from home.