Unlike TCS, Infosys wants to remain flexible on WFH

• Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys has said that they want to remain flexible on its work from home policies.
• Infosys says the number of employees coming back to campuses is going up every week.
• The company said it might give campus hiring a miss this year.

Unlike TCS which wants its employees back to office, Infosys said on Thursday that it wants to remain flexible when it comes to its work-from-home policies.

“We are taking the same approach that we have taken two years back. We are very clear that we want to remain flexible with our employees, and that will continue,” said Salil Parekh, the CEO of Infosys said at the company’s Q2 earning press conference.

Parekh, however, also said that employees are also willingly coming back to campuses. As many as 70% of its employees are on campuses at any given point of the week. Also, every week, the number of employees that are coming back to offices are going up.

“There are instances where specific types of clients or engagements where everyone has to work together. For that, employees are back anyway,” Parekh said.

On Wednesday, another Indian tech major, TCS, had said that it wants to bring back its employees back to offices in order to integrate its new hires with older employees.

“There are things that cannot be taught and observed and better done in a collective manner while co-existing in a workplace,” said N Ganapathy Subramaniam, COO of TCS. In 2021, it had come with a 25/25 policy where they wanted only 25% of their employees at offices.

Hikes announced, no campus hiring this year

Like TCS, Infosys’ employee count has also gone down sequentially. The IT major’s employee count went down by 7,500 to 3,28,764 as of September end.

It intends to honour all the offers made by the company to new employees, and promises to onboard them as necessary. However, it’s probably going to give campus hiring a miss this year.

“It’s not very likely that we are going to campuses to hire this year,” said Nilanjan Roy, chief financial officer of Infosys. The company said that, earlier, it hired ahead of demand which is now hazy.

Infosys is also working to improve its utilisation levels, as a part of its margin improvement programme.

The Bengaluru-based tech major said that it has already announced wage hikes, and will be rolling them out from November 1, onwards. It however did not disclose its variable pay payout details. “Our salary changes will follow regular patterns,” said Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys.

Its attrition is also down to 14.6% as compared to 17.3% in the quarter before.