IT major Infosys has started opening up its offices in a staggered manner as it gears up for a hybrid future work model involving a mix of work-from-home and office.

The company has a total workforce of around 2.4 lakh and an estimated 5 per cent is reporting to office in the first phase as the company gears up for the “new normal”.

The number may grow to around 15-20 per cent in the subsequent phases as the lockdown eases. Infosys said its CEO Salil Parekh has resumed work from the company’s Electronic City headquarters in Bangalore.

Bhubaneswar, Jaipur and Chandigarh are among the campuses where operations have resumed.

Infosys has introduced temperature checks and is using sanitised office vehicles. Alternative seating arrangements in official transports, compulsory masks, touchless water dispensers and the use of thermal scanners are some of the other steps taken for the safety of employees reporting to office.

As part of its future strategy, chief operating officer and wholetime director U.B. Pravin Rao has said that with the current technology, it is now possible to facilitate work from home, but IT firms have to beef up their security.

“From a business continuity perspective over a period of time we will always have some percentage of people working from home, so that in the event of dealing with such situations in the future you will be able to seamlessly switch between work from office and work from home. From a security perspective, we have to invest more in security controls when you are working from home,” Rao had said.

So, that is an area where all of us in the industry must invest a lot,” Rao had said.

TCS, with an organisation strength of 4.48 lakh, is also implementing a similar model.

“It is not just a matter of enabling remote access to hundreds of thousands of employees. We rejigged our cyber security posture, and all our project management practices and systems to ensure that proper work allocation, work monitoring and reporting continued, so that the high quality and delivery certainty that our customers have come to expect from us was never compromised,” Rajesh Gopinathan CEO and MD of TCS, had said while announcing the company’s fourth-quarter earnings.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) has said the sector must take a phased approach with 15-20 per cent of the workforce reporting to office in phase 1 as part of the standard operating procedure.