From Covid-19 compulsion to office mandates: India's five-year WFH journey

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday appealed to people to exercise restraint to help the country cut down on its energy consumption. He urged for more work from home (WFH) as a fuel-saving measure. This appeal has reopened a debate corporate India appeared to have settled: should employees work remotely or return permanently to offices?

 

The debate has shaped Indian workplaces for the past five years, first starting in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown forced millions of workers to work from home.

 

2020: Covid-19 forces India into mass remote work

 

A little over six years ago, PM Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in India to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The lockdown, which was initially only for 21 days, lasted for 68 days. The sudden lockdown sent the Indian workforce into a panic, and prompted a hasty overnight pivot to a work model that few companies had planned for.

 

 

IT giants such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro scrambled to equip hundreds of thousands of employees with laptops and VPN access. At the same time, smaller firms and startups urged employees to use personal computers and home internet. Several industries were able to digitise their operations and survived after initial hiccups. However, labour-intensive sectors like manufacturing, construction, hospitality, etc had to shut operations for several months, prompting layoffs and furloughs.

 

Most companies, led by IT giants, adopted the WFH model and continued for a couple of years. TCS, in May 2020, announced the adoption of the 25*25 work-from-home model. The company believed that by 2025, only 25 per cent of its associates would need to work out of facilities at any point in time, and that employees would not need to spend more than 25 per cent of their time at work.

 

2021: Hybrid work becomes fashionable

 

If 2020 was the year India's workforce was pushed out of the office, in 2021, many decided that a fully work-from-office model was not the way to go. While the year witnessed a deadlier second wave of coronavirus, lockdown restrictions had eased, and offices started seeing employees trickle back in. Yet, many companies increasingly embraced hybrid work models, allowing employees to split their time between home and office.

 

Nasscom, in a workplace survey conducted in July 2021, said that 70 per cent of organisations were looking at a hybrid work model beyond the pandemic. It added that organisations with more than 1,000 employees were more likely to adopt a hybrid operating model.

 

The WFH and hybrid model also pushed companies towards remote-first and location-agnostic hiring. For example, in 2022, Swiggy in a blogpost announced a permanent work-from-anywhere policy for the majority of its roles, allowing employees to work from tier-2, tier-3 towns, since many roles became fully remote permanently. This enabled the company to hire talent from 487 cities across India.

 

The rise of remote and hybrid work also put significant pressure on India’s office-space market. Net absorption of office space declined in the first half of FY22 amid disruptions caused by the second wave of Covid-19, leading vacancy rates across top cities to rise by around 2.6 percentage points to nearly 16.1 per cent, according to a report by ANAROCK Property Consultants.

 

2022: The first return-to-office push

 

By 2022, the severity of Covid-19 had eased significantly, restrictions were lifted, and vaccination had become widespread across the country. This prompted companies to make a case for bringing employees back to offices. However, the transition was far from immediate, as employees, who had spent two years working from home, were reluctant to give it up.

 

The core argument against returning was simple: if work output is the same or better at home, why lose hours to the commute? Commute fatigue, which was once accepted as an unavoidable tax on city living, had now become a choice.

 

This led companies, particularly in technology and finance, to lean on the language of “collaboration” and “in-person culture” in their return-to-office mandates.

 

Concepts such as quiet quitting, where employees limited themselves strictly to assigned responsibilities rather than going beyond them, and moonlighting, where employees secretly took up secondary jobs alongside their primary employment, gained prominence across corporate India.

 

2023-2025: India Inc hardens office mandates

 

By 2023, hiring slowed across sectors and fears of a global economic slowdown grew, which forced companies to tighten their return-to-office policies.

 

Large IT firms led this transition. Several companies gradually increased mandatory in-office attendance, with most settling on three-day-a-week hybrid mandates. TCS said in 2024 that office attendance had returned to near pre-pandemic levels after 18 months of “hard” efforts. On the other hand, HCLTech reportedly introduced policies under which employees failing to meet minimum office attendance requirements could see leave deductions, while Cognizant warned staff that repeated non-compliance with return-to-office rules could even lead to termination.

 

Flipkart, in 2025, ended its work-from-home policy and asked employees to return to the office five days a week, arguing that in-person collaboration led to stronger coordination and productivity.

 

2026: Modi revives WFH but for a different reason

 

In the backdrop of the West Asia crisis, PM Modi appealed for WFH. However, the prime minister has not issued a directive to companies or mandated any formal rule; instead, he appealed to citizens to adopt WFH as a fuel-saving measure. It is being floated as a civic duty, a contribution to national energy security. Companies are under no obligation to act, however, PM's remarks have nonetheless reignited a debate that corporate India thought it had put to rest.