Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy not a fan of WFH culture, wants his employees back in office

With a slump in covid cases across the globe, the world is limping back to normalcy with restrictions being lifted in many countries. From the big tech companies to startups, everybody is slowly eliminating the WFH system and resorting to a hybrid work culture.

Getting back to normalcy is fine, but returning to the office does not sound like a good idea, right? But the bosses have a completely different opinion on this, just like Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy who wants his employees to return to the office now.

Now that the cases have gone down and no new variants showed up, 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 a leading daily. 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 pointed out 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 re-establish 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.