Covid-19 may facilitate work from home option

As social distancing becomes key to contain the spread of the outbreak and myriad workers across sectors being forced to stay away from their workplace, the Covid-19 pandemic could prove to be the tipping point for the workers of the IT sector. For instance, TCS has asked more than 40% of its employees to work from home; while Accenture has moved over 60% of its employees to work from home in India and the Philippines.

Sridhar Mitta, founder of NextWealth Entrepreneurs, a firm that has more than 2,000 people offering services remotely, opines that this will be the testing ground for IT firms to realise what processes can and cannot be done remotely. “The first wave was when companies started outsourcing work to India because of the huge cost differential, followed by Y2K when they needed more people to solve a problem within a short period,” he opines. He even suggests that IT companies are likely to conclude that 20-30% of their workforce can operate remotely.