In September 2023, NovaTech Solutions -- a mid-size IT services company based in Pune with about 3,200 employees -- sent out an internal memo that would end up on Twitter within hours. The memo stated that effective January 2024, all employees would be required to work from the office five days a week. No exceptions. No hybrid arrangements. The remote work policy they had maintained since 2020 was over.
The backlash was immediate. Within two weeks, NovaTech reportedly lost fourteen engineers from their cloud infrastructure team. Their Glassdoor rating dropped from 3.8 to 3.1. A LinkedIn post by a departing employee -- carefully worded but unmistakably bitter -- got over 40,000 impressions.
I reached out to NovaTech's HR head, Sunil Menon, for comment. He was surprisingly candid. "We knew there would be pushback," he told me over a phone call. "But our leadership team felt strongly that in-person collaboration was suffering. Projects were taking longer. New hires were struggling to integrate. We weighed the risks and decided the long-term cost of staying remote was higher than the short-term cost of calling people back."
When I asked him about the engineers who left, he paused. "That hurt. I will not pretend it didn't. But we have already backfilled most of those positions, and the people who stayed are more engaged. At least, that's what the early data suggests."
NovaTech's story is not unique. Across India, companies are wrestling with the same question, and arriving at wildly different answers. I spent the last three months talking to HR leaders, employees, founders, and workplace researchers to understand what Indian companies actually prefer right now -- not what the think pieces say, but what is happening on the ground.
The Return-to-Office Wave
There is no question that a significant number of Indian companies have moved back toward office-first policies in the last year. TCS made headlines with their mandate requiring employees to be in office at least three days a week, and Infosys and Wipro followed with similar frameworks. But the trend extends well beyond IT giants.
I spoke with Radhika Srinivasan, the chief people officer at a manufacturing conglomerate in Chennai that I am calling "Apex Industries" at their request. Their policy shift was even more aggressive than NovaTech's.
"We were never fully remote," Radhika clarified. "Our factory workers were always on-site. But our corporate office -- finance, HR, marketing, about 800 people -- went hybrid during Covid. In mid-2023, we brought everyone back full-time."
Her reasoning was interesting: "There was a growing resentment between the plant workers who never had the option to work from home and the corporate staff who did. It was creating two classes of employees within the same company. That cultural divide was more damaging than any productivity metric."
This is a dimension of the WFH debate that does not get discussed enough. In companies where some roles can be done remotely and others cannot, the flexibility gap can breed real friction. A factory floor supervisor watching the marketing team log in from their living rooms does not read it as "different jobs have different requirements." They read it as "they get special treatment."
Is that perception fair? Maybe not. But perceptions drive culture, and culture drives retention. Radhika's decision was not about productivity data. It was about fairness -- or at least the appearance of it.
Companies Going the Other Way
For every NovaTech pulling people back, there is a company doubling down on remote work. And these are not just tiny startups with five people and a Slack channel.
PixelForge, a Bangalore-based design and UX consultancy with about 150 employees, went fully remote in 2021 and has no plans to change course. I met their founder, Aditya Kulkarni, at a conference in Hyderabad last October. He was characteristically direct about the decision.
"We shut down our office lease," he said. "Completely. We reinvested the rent savings -- about 18 lakhs per month -- into better equipment for employees, quarterly in-person offsites, and a mental health benefits program. Our attrition dropped from 24% to 11% in the first year."
When I pressed him on collaboration challenges, he shrugged. "Sure, some things are harder. Spontaneous whiteboard sessions don't happen the same way on Zoom. But we've adapted. We do weekly design critiques over video. We fly the whole team to Goa or Coorg once a quarter for three days of intensive collaborative work. It's actually more focused than what we used to do in the office, where half the day was spent on commuting and chai breaks."
Aditya's approach reflects a philosophy I have heard from several remote-first Indian companies: spend the money you save on rent to create intentional in-person experiences that are better than what an office provides on a random Tuesday.
Then there is the hybrid middle ground, which is where the largest number of Indian companies seem to be landing. Zenith Infotech, a mid-size software company in Noida, implemented a "3-2 model" -- three days in office, two days remote -- in early 2023. Their HR director, Prerna Kapoor, described it as "the least-bad option."
"Nobody loves it," Prerna admitted with a laugh. "The remote-first people wish it were two days in office. The old-school managers wish it were four. We picked three because it was the number that generated the least number of angry emails."
She is joking, but there is real strategy behind the humor. Zenith surveyed their employees before settling on the model and found that the distribution of preferences was almost perfectly bell-shaped. A small group wanted fully remote. A small group wanted fully in-office. The vast majority wanted some mix, with three days being the most common preference.
What the Employees Actually Think
The corporate policies tell one story. The people living under those policies tell another.
I posted a survey on LinkedIn and through several professional WhatsApp groups, asking working professionals in India one simple question: "What is your ideal work arrangement?" I got 847 responses over two weeks. The results were not surprising, but they were stark.
About 38% wanted a hybrid model with 2-3 days in office. 31% wanted fully remote. 19% wanted hybrid with only 1 day in office per week. And 12% preferred being in the office full-time.
That last number is the one that stands out. Only 12% of respondents actually want to be in the office five days a week. Yet a significant portion of Indian companies are mandating exactly that.
The gap between what employees want and what companies mandate is where all the tension lives.
Sneha Reddy, a product manager at a large e-commerce company in Bangalore, told me about her experience with the return-to-office mandate at her company. "I spent Covid in my hometown in Vizag, working remotely. I was more productive than I had ever been. No two-hour commute. No open office noise. I could focus. When they called us back, I tried it for three months. My commute was 90 minutes each way. I spent most of my in-office time on video calls with colleagues in other cities anyway. I finally quit and joined a remote-first company for a 10% pay cut. Best decision I ever made."
But the pro-office perspective exists too, and it is not just coming from managers trying to justify their floor space. Rohit Sharma, a junior developer at an IT company in Pune (no relation to the cricketer, he told me with the weariness of someone who has made that clarification a thousand times), actively prefers the office.
"I am 24, I live in a one-room apartment with a roommate," he said. "My desk is my dining table. My internet goes out twice a day. I don't have a proper chair. The office has AC, free coffee, fast wifi, and people I can ask questions to without scheduling a Zoom meeting. For me, WFH was never the luxury that it was for people with houses and home offices."
Rohit's point is one that gets lost in the discourse, which tends to be driven by mid-career professionals with comfortable home setups. For younger workers in shared accommodations, or anyone without a dedicated workspace at home, the office is not a burden. It is a resource.
The Tier-2 and Tier-3 City Factor
One of the most significant shifts that remote work enabled was geographic. Professionals who had moved to Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, or Delhi for work could suddenly do that same work from Jaipur, Lucknow, Indore, or their hometown in Kerala.
The cost savings were enormous. A software developer making 15 lakhs per year in Bangalore might spend 30-40% of their salary on rent and living expenses in the city. The same developer working remotely from Bhopal might spend 10-15%. The effective purchasing power of their salary nearly doubles.
Return-to-office mandates threaten this arrangement directly. And it is not just about money. People have rebuilt lives. They have moved back to be near aging parents. They have bought homes in smaller cities. Some have gotten married and settled down in places they never would have considered if remote work were not an option.
Megha Jain, a content strategist who moved from Mumbai to Udaipur during the pandemic, described the return-to-office mandate at her company as "pulling the rug out." She negotiated a fully remote exception, but not everyone at her company was able to do the same. "Three people on my team relocated back to Mumbai. One of them had just bought a flat in Indore. She was devastated."
I asked a few HR leaders about this, and their answers were uncomfortable. Most acknowledged the disruption. None had great solutions. One HR head at a Bangalore tech company told me, off the record, "We know it's hard. But we can't build a company culture around the assumption that everyone is scattered across the country. At some point, you need people in the same room."
Whether that is true or not is probably the defining workplace question of this decade.
The Industry-by-Industry Breakdown
The picture looks very different depending on which industry you are looking at.
IT Services (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL): Almost universally moving toward hybrid with 3+ office days. These companies have massive real estate investments in campuses across India, and empty buildings are expensive. There is also an element of client pressure -- many clients want to know that teams are working from secure, monitored environments, especially for projects involving sensitive data.
Startups (Seed to Series B): Wildly varied. Some are fully remote and proud of it. Others are insisting on in-office because they believe early-stage companies need the energy and speed of in-person collaboration. Anecdotally, startups run by founders under 30 tend to be more office-oriented, while those run by founders over 35 tend to be more open to remote. I have no idea why that pattern exists, but it keeps showing up in my conversations.
Banking and Financial Services: Strongly office-first. Regulatory requirements, data security concerns, and deeply traditional management cultures make remote work a hard sell in most Indian banks and NBFCs. Some have hybrid policies on paper, but employees I spoke with said the culture discourages actually using them. "Sure, I can technically work from home on Fridays," one analyst at a Mumbai bank told me. "But my manager is in the office on Fridays, and he notices who is there and who is not."
E-commerce and Consumer Tech: Mostly hybrid, leaning remote. Companies like Flipkart and Meesho have relatively flexible policies compared to traditional IT services firms. The talent competition in this space is fierce, and flexibility has become a bargaining chip for retention.
Media, Creative, and Content: The most remote-friendly sector I have encountered. Many agencies and media companies in India have gone remote or heavily hybrid, partly because the work does not require physical presence and partly because creative professionals tend to resist rigid structures more than most.
The Productivity Question Nobody Can Answer
Every company I spoke with claimed their policy was backed by productivity data. The office-first companies said productivity improved when people came back. The remote-first companies said productivity improved when people stayed home. The hybrid companies said productivity was best on the in-office days. No, wait, the remote days. Actually, it depends on the team.
The truth is that measuring knowledge worker productivity is genuinely difficult, and most companies are not doing it well. They are using proxy metrics -- hours logged, tickets closed, lines of code committed -- that capture activity but not necessarily output quality. And those metrics can be gamed regardless of where someone is sitting.
Dr. Nisha Verma, a workplace researcher at IIM Ahmedabad, told me something that stuck with me: "The honest answer is that we do not have enough rigorous data to make definitive claims about remote vs. in-office productivity in the Indian context. Most of what we have is survey-based, which measures perception, not reality. People who like working from home report being more productive at home. People who like the office report being more productive in the office. The data reflects preferences more than outcomes."
That is probably the most honest thing anyone told me during three months of reporting on this topic.
What This Means for Job Seekers
If you are currently looking for work in India, here is the practical reality: the work model is now a negotiation point, almost as important as salary for many candidates. And companies know this.
Several recruiters I spoke with confirmed that work location flexibility has become the second or third most common question from candidates, right after compensation and role responsibilities. Some companies are losing candidates at the offer stage because their work-from-office policy is a dealbreaker.
My advice, for whatever it is worth: be honest about what you want, but also be realistic about what is available. Fully remote roles exist in India, but they are a minority. If remote work is non-negotiable for you, you are working with a smaller pool of opportunities, and you should plan your job search accordingly.
If you are flexible on the model but have a preference, ask about it early in the interview process. Not in the first call, but definitely by the second. Something like, "Can you walk me through how the team typically works day-to-day? How many days are people usually in the office?" It is a neutral question that gets you the information you need without sounding like you are already planning your work-from-home wardrobe.
Where Is This All Going?
I have been covering workplace trends for six years, and I have never been less confident in predicting where things are headed. Every time I think the trend is clearly moving toward office-first, a major company goes fully remote. Every time I think remote is winning, another round of return-to-office mandates drops.
What I can say is this: the idea that there is one right answer -- that either remote work or office work is objectively better -- is a fiction. It depends on the company, the role, the team, the individual, the city, the industry, the stage of the company, and probably a dozen other variables I have not thought of.
The companies that seem to be doing the best are the ones that have stopped treating this as an ideological question and started treating it as a practical one. What does this specific team need? What does the work actually require? Where do people do their best thinking, and is that the same place where they do their best collaborating?
Those are hard questions. They do not have clean answers. And that, more than anything, is the real state of work in India right now. Everyone is figuring it out as they go. The companies that pretend they have it all sorted are probably the ones you should be most skeptical of.
I will keep reporting on this. I suspect I will be writing about it for years to come, because I genuinely do not think this settles anytime soon. Maybe it never settles. Maybe the constant negotiation between employers and employees over where work happens is just... the new normal. And we are all going to have to get comfortable with the ambiguity.
Comments