Ever since the covid-19 pandemic invaded India, several companies instructed their employees to work from home in a bid to keep their businesses running while keeping them safe.
Now, after almost two years of the fatal pandemic, people like Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy want their employees to come back to the office who were well adjusted to the long WFH culture.
“I am not a great fan of work from home at all,” the IT veteran said during a summit. “When people work from home, that institutional culture will slowly become weaker and weaker,” Deccan Herald quoted him as saying.
Murthy said that WFH doesn’t work in countries in India as they live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.
Citing Germany’s example, he said that people worked “over 16 hours a day and 6 days a week” to rebuild their economy after the second world war. “I believe in emulating that as it is the only way we can elevate our economy and follow China,” he added.
Stressing on why he wanted people to come back, he said that it was very difficult to build a culture of ‘hard work, imagination, excellence, intuition, meritocracy, discussion and debate’.
He added that even though WFH was necessary during the pandemic, employees should get back to the office to boost productivity.
This is how people reacted to him desperately wanting employees to return back to the office:
Earlier, CRED founder said WFH is ‘damaging’ as people get no ‘network skills’. What are your opinions on this matter? Would you like to resume work from office?