TCS Work From Home: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the largest software exporter in the country, has asked employees to return to office and the company has also been taking action on those not adhering to the policy.
Even though the firm’s decision to push employees to come to office at least three days a week may be bringing benefits for the company, it has at least two adverse impacts on the employees.
The first is the rise in attrition among women and the second is a sharp decline in the average learning hours per employee. According to the company’s integrated annual report for 2022-2023, the average learning hours have dropped from 121 in FY22, to 82 in FY23.
Though the company did not give any explanation in this regard, some employees said they are still adjusting to the new way of life involving travelling to the office, as per TOI report.
“Productivity is hampered because we lose a lot of time in the commute which would have otherwise been devoted to completing some course,” a mid-level employee at TCS said speaking to TOI.
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Aditya Mishra, CEO at staffing services firm CIEL HR, said as the world gradually returns to work from office, employees have had to adjust their routines and allocate time for travelling.
The company in the annual report said that among mid-level employees at TCS, average learning hours dropped to 40 in FY23, from about 50 in the year before.
“Up to 90 per cent of mid-level employees at TCS participated in the mid-level training programme, but only 60 per cent of them have been certified on ‘relevant market technologies’, the IT giant’s annual report said.
The average learning hours among junior employees declined to about 100 in FY23, from over 140 hours in the year before.
The annual report further revealed among seniors in the organisation, the learning hours was on average 77 for men and 91 for women in FY22, but was only 41 to 42 hours in FY23.
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TCS said their investment in learning is going in the right direction. “Our learning efforts are calibrated based on various factors such as company strategy, market need, learning models, workforce mix, and hiring volumes,” the company said. Analysts say the drop is likely to be temporary. “Amid various changes occurring in the job market due to the influence of AI, tech employees are aware of the need to stay informed,” Mishra said as quoted by TOI.
On the other hand, the company also noted an unusual phenomenon relating to female attrition. Women’s attrition rate, which has historically been similar to or lower than men’s attrition at TCS, was higher this time around.
“There might be other reasons, but intuitively, I would think working from home during the pandemic reset the domestic arrangements for some women,” said Milind Lakkad, the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) of TCS.
Lakkad added that this change in domestic arrangement could have kept women from returning to office even after everything normalised.
Lakkad said that the “higher attrition among women in FY2023 is a setback to our efforts to promote gender diversity, but we are doubling down on it.”
According to its integrated annual report for 2022-2023, TCS currently has over 2,20,000 female employees. They comprise 35.7 per cent of the company’s workforce. The report said that there has been a 60 per cent increase in senior women executives over the past five years.
