Work from Home Days Over: TCS links variable pay to Office attendance

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the biggest provider of Information Technology (IT) services in India, has declared that employees who attend work less than 60% of the time will not be eligible for variable compensation. The company has also tightened its attendance requirement. It is anticipated that other IT companies also want to discourage work from home and will follow foot step of TCS.

Employees who have office attendance of more than 60% but less than 75% will receive a 50% incentive, following TCS’s new HR policy.

As per the article, the corporation requires a minimum of 85% of its employees to be in the office in order for them to collect their entire quarterly variable compensation going forward. Discipline measures may also be implemented if this is consistently broken. Employees with office attendance exceeding 75% but below 85% will get a bonus payment of 70%; those with attendance above 85% will receive a bonus payment of 100%.

TCS abolished its hybrid working arrangement in October 2023. In mid-September, the business sent out an internal email stating that starting on October 1, 2023, employees were required to report to work five days a week. Up until that point, workers were only expected to spend three days a week in the workplace.

Since then, the company has pushed for employees to return to the office in order to ensure increased production, repeating its position every quarter. TCS noted in its FY23 annual report that over half of its workforce was employed after March 2020 and that new hires gain acculturation and knowledge from senior colleagues’ and leaders’ behaviors and ways of thinking through in-person interactions.

Employee acculturation and engagement suffered greatly in the absence of those exchanges. We gradually started welcoming individuals back to our offices throughout the year as a result of all these things,” the business stated.

Just a quarter after the policy’s introduction, TCS’s new CEO and MD, K Krithivasan, disclosed in January of this year that about 65% of TCS associates were in the office three to five days a week.