percent companies employees working till work wfh

Work From Home Till December 31The Department of Telecommunication (DoT) has relaxed norms for facilitatingwork from home (WFH) for IT firms till the end of 2020 due to the novelcoronavirus, or COVID-19, outbreak.In an order dated July 21, DoT, said, “In the view of ongoing concerns due toCOVID-19, the department has decided to further extend these relaxation up toDecember 31, or until further orders, whichever is earlier.”The order for relaxation, which was first granted till April 30, was extendedto July 31.The relaxation is for the Other Service Provider (OSP) licence, which isnecessary for companies to enable WFH. Earlier, Nasscom has written to theMinistry of Electronics and Information Technology to make relaxations aroundWFH permanent. But the industry is now looking to adopt a hybrid working modelon the back of the pandemic.The relaxation will give companies enough room to extend WFH for all theiremployees until the end of the year. As per current State government orders,IT companies can operate anywhere between 30 percent and 50 percent capacity.In Pune, where the lockdown was imposed for 10 days from July 13, companiescan work at 30 percent capacity.However, in most IT firms, less than 5 percent of their employees are workingfrom offices and companies are in no hurry to bring their employees back towork. Companies do not see more than 5-10 percent of their employees workingin campuses till a vaccine is found. Indian IT/ITeS industry employs about 50lakh people.Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has made WFH more or less permanent as it doesnot expect more than 25 percent of its employees working from offices not morethan 25 percent of the time. However its peers Wipro, Infosys and HCLTechnologies are looking at a hybrid model, where some percent of theworkforce will work from office and home.VV Apparao, Chief Human Resource Officer, HCL Tech, told Moneycontrol in arecentinteractionthat the company is not making WFH permanent since permission from governmentand clients are temporary. In addition, the management does not think workingfrom home continuously will be healthy, either physically or mentally, headded.