Building connect with staff a huge challenge now: Rishad Premji, ETHRWorld

IT companies are currently facing a “huge” challenge in building a sense of connectedness between their employees and the organisation, said Rishad Premji, executive chairman, Wipro.

Of its 260,000-strong workforce, around 100,000 are new recruits who have joined in the last 30 months, Premji said.

“We have less than 10% of people coming in and we have 30% of our people living in tier II and tier III cities which are their hometowns,” he added, explaining why driving a sense of belonging was a challenge.

“How do you drive that deep sense of connectedness is a big challenge. One of the ways we do it is through sessions…we connect with people by eating out,” Premji said at the Nasscom Product Conclave 2022.

“I’m a big believer that people should come back (to physical offices). All of our people should come back some of the time in some sort of a hybrid model. (This is) because organizations grow when people gossip, connect over coffee, connect over lunch,” the 45-year-old said.

He called this future workplace challenge “quite unique” to the IT industry, while other sectors like manufacturing, consumer products and healthcare have got almost 100% of their workforce to return to offices.

‘Wipro built on integrity and governance’

On how Wipro survived the testing times and what startups should learn from companies like itself, he said…