As third wave of Covid-19 sets in, India Inc sends staff back home

Companies are delaying return-to-office plans or are reverting to work from home where they have already called back staff to offices, as the country witnesses another wave of Covid-19 cases.
Many companies had resumed work from offices and a number of others were planning to call back employees starting the new year, as most states were reporting very few Covid cases. But that has changed towards the end of December, when cases started doubling every few days.

Companies are now taking a cautious approach, as many employees are down with Covid. They are even reducing work hours for essential staffers or conducting regular testing for them.

Deloitte India, which had plans to start offices in the second week of January in a hybrid mode, has postponed it and is in a "wait-and-watch" mode. "We don't want to take the risk of people coming into office and falling sick," chief talent officer SV Nathan said.



Zomato, Axis Bank, ITC and Flipkart among others have asked their employees who were coming to offices to now work remotely, except in case of essential staff.

Corporate employees at Flipkart were allowed to voluntarily come into office from December 1. They are now told to not come into office for the next two weeks, or until further notice, a spokesperson said.

Zomato switched to WFH for office employees in December itself, seeing early signs of the new wave of the pandemic.

Earlier this week, the cigarettes-to-hospitality conglomerate ITC advised employees in Kolkata, the National Capital Region and Mumbai to work from home unless essential.

Keeping an eye on new variant, cos now on wait & watch mode
Elsewhere, the attendance at ITC is limited to 30%.

Diagnostics startup Healthians has just half the employees working from offices.

Since last week, all corporate employees except for some essential staffers at Axis Bank have returned to WFH. Before that, the private sector bank had 35% of these employees working from offices in a hybrid mode.

At edtech company UpGrad, where 80% of employees had returned to offices, many are now down with Covid-19.

"About 30% who were in offices are down with Covid. We have moved the rest around since there is now more space," managing director Mayank Kumar said.

It has now put on hold the plan of calling back the remaining 20%.

In fact, even before the home ministry issued its latest directive on December 27, calling for WFH "as far as possible", many companies were already reconsidering their return-to-office plans, according to a survey by CIEL HR Services conducted in the week to December 26.

More than half the companies it surveyed said they were in a wait-and-watch mode, even as the Omicron variant triggered the new global wave of the pandemic. The survey covered 690 companies across industry sectors.

"Most companies have delayed their plans to call the workforce back to offices as of the last week of December and now almost all companies are putting this on hold," CIEL HR chief executive Aditya Mishra said.

"It is a rough start to the year. We were hopeful of normalcy to return in business operations but now we are in a much more viral phase of the pandemic," said N Venu, managing director of India and South Asia at Hitachi Energy. The company is asking all office-based employees to work from home to the extent possible and in some other cases, it has restricted attendance to less than 50%.