In a memo sent by Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S through an email to its employees few days ago, the US-headquartered IT services and consulting major said it expects India employees to work from the office at least thrice a week.
Cognizant wants employees to use the in-person time to prioritise activities that benefit greatly from being together including doing collaborative projects, training and team building exercises.
Over the last few months, Cognizant’s homegrown rivals such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro have already mandated employees to return to the office in 2023, with a schedule of five days a week, 10 days a month and three days a week, respectively. The push to return to office is being implemented by several IT and technology companies across the country through verbal and formal communication channels.
Cognizant will also launch a new hybrid work scheduling app for India to help managers coordinate schedules and reserve space in office for their teams, the email stated.
An email sent to Cognizant spokesperson did not elicit a response immediately.
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Of the total 347,700 workforce, around 254,000 of them are based in India, according to its annual report, making the country its largest talent base.Nasdaq-listed Cognizant bucked the industry trend in the latest quarter by increasing its employee base by 1,100 during the October to December period. However, in 2023, Cognizant’s total headcount reduced by 7,600 people with around 4,500 employees in India and nearly 3,000 employees onsite.
Last week, TCS chief K Krithivasan said he believes that work from home/hybrid model is not the right way to grow both individually as well as for organizations. “As an organization, we value collaboration and camaraderie and this cannot be achieved through Zoom calls or other online medium. Also, as much 30-40% of our associates have joined us since the pandemic and if they don’t come to the office, how do they learn these values and organizational cultures?”
He added, “Because the most important learning comes from seeing how seniors are doing a job. We are not for work from home, because we believe that working from office is the right way of working. Almost 100% of our customers are keen to get their workforce back to office and almost every one of them believes that the right thing to do is work from office.”
The work-from-office mandate comes at a time when the $250 billion IT industry is staring at a washout year as the growth in the ongoing fiscal year is slated to be its lowest ever. Simultaneously, the industry’s headcount has unusually also shrunk to its lowest in more than two decades and the firms are finding it difficult to retain quality talent.
Industry body Nasscom recently released latest data to show that only 60,000 job additions in the current financial year since April, taking the overall headcount to of the IT industry at 5.43 million.
