Creating a thriving remote, secure and agile workplace

But the pandemic has taught us a shocking and important lesson: a highly productive workforce doesn’t actually have to go to our places of work. They can be just as, if not more, productive from home—if they have the right technology and the right leadership practices that keep them focused and energised.

What’s more, we have found that remote working is a tactical response that can work for a period of time—if employees can use technology to do their work.

However, simply telling employees to work from home using the technology we have given them is not nearly enough to transform the way TCS does its work.

It will also come from revamping the way we manage our people and handle other governance issues.

Eliminating long, costly and frustrating commutes from home will only satisfy some employees for a certain period of time. Management at TCS is learning quickly that making the remote employee feel as if he or she is even more central to our organisation’s success is what will keep them productive, content and motivated to continue working for us and do their best for our clients.

I believe our lessons may be valuable to other companies—both our “hits” and our “misses”—in shifting our work from our workplaces to our employees’ homes.

It wasn’t through the magic that we were able to go in weeks from having hundreds of thousands of employees working from offices to having them work in their homes.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, we had put several pieces in place years ago.

The first piece was an approach to managing agile work teams whose team members couldn’t be in the same room. We called our agile model the Location Independent Agile. It was an alternative to overcome the biggest constraints for agile teams: that they couldn’t always do their planning in the same room.

Large corporations, with employee work teams that can span time zones, for years have needed to have their agile team members working from different offices, often on different continents. Our approach to agile enabled our teams to collaborate in real-time across geographies and iteratively develop new digital business processes for clients. Their goal: deliver a minimum viable product quickly.

Concurrently, we were investing in “Open Agile Collaborative Workspaces” (OACW).

By “workspaces,” I refer to computers that our employees could carry with them that were replete with collaboration software and tap into data and applications that we stored in the cloud.

And since that data and applications were in the cloud rather than a computer room at one of our offices, it meant we had to shore up their security from being hacked. We have done that, in part through continually monitoring them and using automation to detect abnormal accesses.

Based on having those two pieces in place—a distributed approach to managing agile teams and the technology that allowed those team members to work anywhere—we rapidly shifted our work from our offices to employees’ homes.

The feedback from our employees and our clients has been so positive that TCS announced its 25x25 operating model vision. What that means is that by 2025, up to 25 percent of TCS’ workforce will work out of TCS facilities at any time to achieve 100 percent productivity, with associates spending only 25 percent of their time in the office. And within project teams, only 25 percent of employees can be co-located.

Based on our experience, what should organisations that want to achieve something similar do to make it happen? We see five areas to think about:

The new workplace model will have to maximise the creative and collaborative potential of a shared space, allowing for all individual and asynchronous work to be done outside of it, remotely. Teams in the future will be distributed geographically as opposed to being located in centralised, downtown-type locations.

One of the disadvantages of remote work is the lack of ambient awareness in individuals and teams—i.e., people’s ability to see non-verbal and other signs of behavior. The ability to digitally enable ambient awareness and deliver contextual knowledge to remote employees when they need it presents a problem that we think a combination of culture change and technology—such as augmented and virtual reality technologies supported by advanced algorithms—can solve in the years ahead.

With a large number of remote employees, organisations must stay in touch with them more frequently. It requires hyperconnected leadership—i.e., managers who constantly interact (two-way, not one way) with employees. In a time of physical distancing, social connections become more crucial.

Automation merely for the sake of cutting labor costs will have diminishing returns. Automation designed to make people more productive is more important.

Remote working will change the nature of middle management. Micromanagement and traditional command-and-control structures will simply not work or scale. Work must be self-governed and outcome-oriented, as opposed to purely task- and time-oriented methods of management. Organisations must empower employees with digital tools that measure, benchmark and improve their performance.

From our experience, we believe that remote work will not only be a short-term response to a crisis. It will be a new way of structuring work that will offer significant benefits.