Infosys founder Narayana Murthy says WFH not suitable for India, wants IT employees back in office

Infosys founder Narayana Murthy does not want his employees to work from home anymore.

With a slump in covid cases across the globe, the world is limping back to normalcy. Fewer cured cases also mean that the restrictions around the virus have also started to ease a bit. From the big tech companies to startups, everybody is slowly eliminating the WFH system. Getting back to normalcy is fine, but returning to the office does not sound like a good idea, but the bosses have a completely different opinion on this than us. Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy now wants his employees to return to the office.

For the past two years, employees across the globe were directed to work from home. Every time there was a slight dip in Covid cases, a new variant showed up and messed it up for everybody. However, now that the cases have gone down, Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy does not think it is a good idea to let employees work from home.

“I am not a great fan of work from home at all. “When people work from home, that institutional culture will slowly become weaker and weaker,” Murthy was quoted by Deccan Herald as saying. He said that in the work from home culture it is very difficult “to build a culture of hard work, imagination, excellence, intuition, meritocracy, discussion and debate if people work from home.”

Murthy went on to say that work from home system does not work in a country like India where people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’. He also highlighted that India’s productivity was less than Bangladesh's during the Covid times.

Murthy urged the corporate denizens to head back to the office to “boost productivity” as it was important for a country like India, which wants to overtake China in terms of per capita income, the report said. He seems to be in complete awe of how Germans worked in the late 1940s. Murthy said that people worked “over 16 hours a day and 6 days a week” to reestablish 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.

Murthy isn’t the first tech honcho to express his views against working from home. Previously, Kunal Shah, the founder of fintech company CRED, had called working from home comfortable but damaging. “Impact of WFH on youth is the same as the impact of children who study at home. No real bonds. No real social or network skills. Illusion of understanding and learning. No osmosis. Comfortable but damaging in the long run,” he said.

His post was met with mixed reactions on social media. One of the users wrote, “That's the kind of boss I want to avoid at all cost. Its a very linear way of thinking. On the contrary, we are finding new ways to collaborate, we are spending more time with family. We can now focus on our bigger goals, and oohh..and health benefits on not inhaling pollution.”