Recently, IT major TCS had announced that 75% of its 4.48 lakh employees globally will work from home by 2025. Now it's Infosys. The IT services major is mulling permanent work from home for its 33-35% employees, as per a report by Business Today.

The report quoted Richard Lobo, Executive Vice President, Head HR, Infosys who said, "Once things are normal, over a period of time, probably 50 percent of employees will come to the office and the rest will work from home. Moving on, 66 percent will be in office but 33 percent will work permanently from home." That translates to around 80,000 of its 2,42,371 employees globally to be working from home permanently.

Lobo added, "A large proportion of our people will continue to work from home or work remotely. Though, it will not always be the same set of people. I don't see any shift in that because people have now become used to it across the world." 

The IT firm however didn't share the timeline by when it is likely to happen given that it largely depends on how the disease goes, added Lobo.

As lockdowns have been lifted gradually, Infosys has currently about 5 percent of its workforce going to office in India while the rest are working from home. When it comes to the next few months, if the pandemic goes the way it is, for most countries and if everything goes well, a third of total employees will come back to the office.

Interestingly, in the press conference after the Q4 results on April 20, Infosys COO Pravin Rao had stated that the firm had not seen any loss in productivity since people have got used to WFH. He believed that people are getting adjusted and it may be a new normal and there will always be some element of work from home.

Rao had further added that one of the benefits of the remote working model was it is possible to leverage people, capability wherever it exists and it is also probably possible to start looking at gig workers. There are cost benefits too given that you don't have to invest as much in real estate, travel costs may come down but you have to invest a lot more in technology, security, and other things. 

While companies allowed work from home earlier also but COVID-19 has accelerated the trend and broken several mental barriers around productivity or efficiency of employees when working from home. In this decision, Infosys joins many other global organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Google who have asked employees to WFH permanently till the end of this year.