Where, when, how?: Dhamini Ratnam writes on the great office reshuffle
Work from home or the office? Hybrid or flexible? As the debate drags on, the real question isn’t being asked enough: How are the employees actually doing?
In 2020, Zoom became a verb, and work from home (WFH), a necessity.
In 2021, return to office (RTO) was a catchphrase that , some employees claimed, symbolised corporate greed that prioritised profit over their mental and physical health. Others pointed to the benefits of physical workplaces.
It is a debate that continues.
By 2024, chief executive officers of multi-million-dollar corporations, notably Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart, stressed that RTO was the way to go, though CEOs of smaller companies didn’t agree. Over the past five years, the disruption to how we work and live has led to phenomena such as Om Nomis (online drinking sessions), workplace hangouts, quiet quitting, the Great Resignation and the Great Detachment (a sense of disengagement faced by burnt-out employees; a coin termed by Gallup). It also involved sneaky stealth sacking by some employers who would rather pick on minor personal infractions than admit to wider layoffs.
Everyone of note has waded into the debate; many have polarised it.
Last month, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, known for his “corporate-like work ethic”, said WFH would enhance women’s workforce participation, when announcing a policy to help incentivise the development of information technology and global capability centres.
At the other end of the spectrum, US President Donald Trump recently cast doubt on federal employees working from home, and said they likely either held two jobs or spent their time playing tennis or golf. His government has pushed workers to either receive payouts and quit or return to the office full-time.
The two-jobs bit isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: a large Indian IT company discovered some of its WFH engineers held two jobs (by tracking Employee Provident Fund Organization data)
According to the KPMG 2024 CEO Outlook survey, which spoke to 125 Indian CEOs, 78% envisioned an in-office workplace within the next three years. Another study by Zoom and Reworked Insights surveyed more than 600 IT and C-suite leaders and nearly 1,900 knowledge workers, and found a preference for remote working and flexi-time hybrid working among employees.
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This issue has more than two sides. A clutch of recent surveys indicate that the benefits of WFH are far more acceptable to employers, even as an increased number of employees are happy to return to the office, even if for a few days a week.
Employee happiness is a concern among several companies, and flexibility towards work can take many shapes.
Ashish (who asked that his surname be withheld) turned 28 the year the pandemic began. He had just joined a technology services company in Mumbai, before his company asked employees to work from home following orders from the state government. Over the course of the subsequent lockdowns, Ashish, now a father to a four-year-old, converted part of his home into a workspace and synced his Google Calendar with that of his wife, a public relations professional, so they could better manage the cooking, cleaning and care-giving.
“There were times when it all felt overwhelming. But work from home, tough though it was, allowed me to see my son take his first steps,” Ashish says.
In 2023, his company asked its employees to return to work full-time, but also gave managers the leeway to create a roster system that permitted hybrid working for at least one week a month.
Mehrunissa, 36, a frontline worker providing aid to marginalised groups in and around Kolkata through the pandemic, earned herself a new role in 2023 that meant she could work from home. “I won’t call this remote working because I still have to meet the groups I work with. That’s the real work. The rest of it is just writing emails and managing people and schedules,” she says.
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By 2023, legal firms in India were helping companies rewrite employee contracts in a post-pandemic landscape.
“Employment contracts along with policies now have a common reference of remote working as an interim arrangement under specific circumstances. We have advised several clients across industries to update contract templates and policies to reflect this policy perspective,” says Anshul Prakash, a partner with the law firm Khaitan & Co.
The larger question, says Aparna Piramal Raje, author of Chemical Khichdi: How I Hacked my Mental Health (2022), is: How are companies making hybrid work? “In general, for corporate India, employee mental health is still the kind of conversation that climate change was 20 years ago. People are unfamiliar with the techniques, tools, vocabulary and sensitivities around workplace mental health,” she adds.
What change will 2025 bring?
Hubble, an office space management company, conducted a study on what the next 12 months could look like for remote work, by speaking to the founders of 125 start-ups and scale-ups in the UK. “The once routine 5-days-in-the-office has turned into an ongoing experiment, as organisations try to keep pace with what the office means for them today,” the report states.
This is true in India too. Post-pandemic, Godrej Industries Group has developed different policies for its diverse verticals (agriculture, real-estate, capital, consumer goods, chemicals, fund management).
“For roles and teams where a physical presence is crucial, such as in our manufacturing units and certain customer-facing operations, our colleagues work on-site. For most other teams, our pandemic lessons have allowed us to embrace hybrid work wherever possible, as flexibility drives both well-being and performance. At our head office, all team members are encouraged to come in at least three times a week,” says Sumit Mitra, head of group HR and corporate services.
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The Hubble survey threw up one particularly interesting finding: while nearly 75% of respondents have a hybrid workspace, they were more likely to change their WFH policy in favour of a return to the office, than those working either fully remotely or fully in-office.
A hybrid approach does require negotiation, says Kimberly Wright Dixit, co-founder and CEO of the education consultancy Red Pen. Remote work is the norm in her 140-employee company, with workers spread out across seven cities. Most employees are asked to come in at least once a week. In Delhi, employees work from a co-working space once a week.
Dixit believes the policy has helped her acquire and retain talent.
In one direct advantage, she adds, “remote working allows my company to hire people who we may not have been able to on account of their location”.
There is a larger question, of course. How are these people, wherever they work from, actually doing?
While wellness days off, and free counselling sessions, were trendy and more common in the pandemic, some companies have since rolled them back, though the employee stress and anxiety that prompted such measures, of course, have not declined.
In the long wake of the pandemic, amid the anxiety of juggling a return to the office and redrawn lives and schedules, it is possible that help is now almost as urgent as it was in early 2020.
Perhaps 2025 will be the year that hybrid work finally comes into its own and holistic HR finally becomes a stated demand. It could be the first step in a much-delayed attempt at a work-life balance. And wouldn’t that be nice?
(dhamini.ratnam@htlive.com)
