WFH culture forces IT businesses to penetrate Tier II and Tier III locations

23 Jun 2023 , 12:40 PM

Major IT vendors have been pressuring staff to work remotely. Both Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys recently informed their staff via email that they would begin working from offices. Employees at other Indian IT firms like HCL Tech and Wipro have also been encouraged to adopt a mixed working style.

Major IT businesses are starting to expand into Tier II and Tier III locations in India after functioning for decades from Tier I cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi. The opening of Infosys’ new office in Yelahanka, Karnataka, is a recent illustration of this pattern. Employees were informed of the new arrangement in an email from the human resources department on Monday when the campus officially opened for business.

The business said in an internal email to its staff that the new building will support its mixed work approach. We are happy to announce the opening of our new North Gate facility in north Bengaluru to further encourage flexibility and enable you to work remotely and close to your residences, according to the statement.

In order to tap into the talent pool in those areas, Infosys has also opened offices in tier II cities like Visakhapatnam and Coimbatore as part of its efforts to quicken the implementation of its hybrid work approach.

To enable staff to work closer to their homes, other IT firms, besides Infosys, are also opening facilities in tier-II and tier-III cities. A few months ago, the IT giant Accenture opened offices in Jaipur and Coimbatore, expanding its access to a larger talent pool and giving employees more freedom to choose where they will work. Accenture had previously only previously operated in India’s big cities.

According to Sandeep Patel, MD India-South Asia, in an interview with Business Today earlier this year, IT firm IBM has begun putting up centres in tier II and tier III towns.

I prefer to refer to them as rising regions rather than tier II or tier III cities, he said. They benefit in that we can tap into the local talent pool, set up training facilities for local talent, and then integrate them into the broader firm.

Another Indian IT company, Persistent Systems, has adopted this strategy to draw workers into the workplace. Centres have been established in Nagpur and Goa. In Tier II cities all around India, TCS maintains offices, including Bhubaneswar, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Nagpur, Indore, Varanasi, and Gandhinagar.

Major IT vendors have been pressuring staff to work remotely. Both Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys recently informed their staff via email that they would begin working from offices. Employees at other Indian IT firms like HCL Tech and Wipro have also been encouraged to adopt a mixed working style.

Moving to tier 2 and tier 3 cities now makes more commercial sense than it did a few decades ago, Sabharwal said. Everything has advanced significantly, including internet usage, education, infrastructure, supply chains, transportation, and logistics. Businesses are showing more interest in Tier II and Tier III cities as they can now scale up more easily.

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