New Delhi: As the pandemic rages across the country, employees across different states are working from home. Positive cases of the viral illness reached 1.6 million and employers aren’t calling their workers back to office premises anytime soon –not at least in 2020.

Instead of turning out to be a human resource nightmare, corporates across sectors continue to report high productivity month after month. And employees, it seems, are okay working from home.

According to a recent report in the business daily Economic Times, just 30% of those working from home across 550 companies across 15 industrial sectors want to return to office spaces. A survey of 1800 employees conducted by Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm for ET, 70% are comfortable working from the safety of their homes.

According to the report, out of the surveyed employees across these 550 organisations, only 30% those want to return to offices are mostly in managerial roles.

Among the companies which were surveyed included top Indian Information Technology players, the Big 4 consulting companies, Indian e-commerce companies, MNCs, auto and banking firms.

How corporates are approaching WFH

However, certain employers aren’t buying into the work from home culture and have asked their employee to return to offices. One IT firm which employs over 8,000 people asked 30% of its workforce to join the office but only 20% or less are willing to return, the survey found.

“But as the productivity is high, this company is alright with WFH arrangement for over 80% employees,” said Kamal Karanth, co-founder, Xpheno told ET. The report says that only a fraction of workers of large companies Maruti, Tech Mahindra, Myntra, Whirlpool, Perfetti Van Melle are returning to offices. Myntra spokesperson said less than 10% of the company’s workforce, which includes employees who depend on office infrastructure for their work, are being allowed to work from office.

There are others like consulting firm EY and consumer durables major Whirlpool which have given their employees to either work from home or office.

An earlier ET Now analysis showed that over 95% of employees in India’s top 5 IT companies continue to work from home, according to data shared by the management for the quarter ended June 30.

India’s top 5 IT majors–TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra together have over 11.38 lakh employees on their rolls for the quarter ended June. A 95% average would mean 10.81 lakh employees are working from home, an incredible feat of execution and technology.  

DoT norms for WFH

The Department of Telecommunication (DoT) on July 21 extended the relaxation in work from home norms till December 31 for other service providers (OSPs), including the IT sector in a second such extension given to OSPs, primarily IT and IT-enabled services firms due to the pandemic. The DoT first announced work from home norms in April.

“DoT has further extended the relaxations in the terms and conditions for other service providers (OSPs) up to 31 December 2020, to facilitate work from home in view of the ongoing concerns due to #COVID19,” the DoT said in a Twitter post earlier.