TCS setting up eight new office spaces that can seat 10,000 staffers each

Tata Consultancy Services is in the process of establishing eight new large office spaces with each having a capacity to house more than 10,000 employees.

Some of these centres are coming up in non-metro cities and will focus on tier two presence of the country’s largest IT services company, TCS chief financial officer Samir Seksaria told ET.

These large campuses are part of large cycle projects that take 3-5 years for completion, he said. They are planned in line with the company’s 25 by 25 model that entails having only 25% of the workforce working from offices for 25% of the time by 2025.

As part of the strategy, these new spaces will be designed to be more collaborative in nature, Seksaria said.

“Given the direction and what we thought about on the 25 by 25 model, we have not given up a single office space. We have our owned offices and leased offices, we have not given up anything and we continue to invest,” he said.

TCS has added more than 100,000 employees to its pool over the past year, taking its headcount past 600,000 as of June 2022.

The company has a presence across cities like Bhubaneswar, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, Indore, Varanasi, Baroda, Bhopal, and Gandhinagar among others.

ET had reported earlier that TCS is expanding its presence in non-metro regions like Guwahati, Nagpur, and Goa to get employees out of homes into official workspaces to encourage collaboration as many show reticence to get back to base locations after shifting homes to their native spaces following the Covid-19 disruptions and work from home.

TCS is keen to have all its employees attending office physically before it transitions to the 25 by 25 model.

The company has set up occasional operating zones (OOZ) and hot desks to enable employees to plug in their system in any office around the country.

Almost 60% IT associates have gone back to their hometowns in the non-metro regions during the pandemic and attempts to persuade such employees to return to base locations is leading to higher attrition in the industry, experts said.

Companies are now growing their base in tier two cities to tap into the large pool of talent, they said.

Infosys, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Mindtree among others have noted better retention rates in these regions.

Seksaria, however, said TCS’ focus on tier-2 cities existed pre-pandemic also. “We have been investing in these cities prior to the pandemic as well,” he said. “Our most recent campuses that were launched pre-pandemic were in Nagpur, Pune and Bhubaneswar, so that investment has always been there.”