Steel firms plan return to office, set up 'flexible' policies for employees

Tata Steel will allow employees to choose between working from home or office; JSW Steel is weighing a distributed workplace strategy

Four months into “unlocking” India and amid rising hope for vaccines, the country’s largest steelmakers – Tata Steel and JSW Steel – are chalking out policies for workplace and workforce.

Tata Steel is coming out with a new policy effective November that will allow employees to choose between working from home and working out of office; JSW Steel, on the other hand, is mulling a distributed workplace strategy from next financial year.

T V Narendran, managing director and chief executive officer of Tata Steel, said, “We are coming out with some new policies effective from November 1, which we will try for a year. It will give people a lot of flexibility to decide.” Details of the policy are not yet known.

At Tata Steel, employees have been working from home except when absolutely “essential”. Narendran, too, has been going to office intermittently, only when needed.

For JSW Steel, a combination of strategies has been at play; some are going to the office, some on a rotational basis and others working from home. The leadership – Sajjan Jindal (chairman), Seshagiri Rao (joint managing director and group chief financial officer), Jayant Acharya (director – commercial & marketing) – however, resumed office from June 1.

“As a company, we do not want to continue the work from home policy for long. We are thinking of rearranging the working system starting April 1,” said Seshagiri Rao, joint managing director and group chief financial officer, JSW Steel, who has been self-driving to work.

The rearrangement under consideration centres largely around reducing the number of people in Mumbai corporate office and creating hubs across the country. So, there could be a commercial hub having people doing commercial work from one location and a finance hub that would have people from the department working from a single location.

“Discussions are going on, but we are yet to take a decision. The feedback that we have from employees is that the preference is to come to office,” explained Rao.

It’s not just JSW Steel and Tata Steel that are rethinking their strategies. According to sources close to development, Vedanta and Aditya Birla group companies were also chalking out new working policies, but refused to share details.

 

Viral Thakker, Partner, Deloitte India, said, "The common model being considered by companies is to have multiple teams, alternatively coming into office and working from home."

"A distributed set of offices make sense and that’s something that companies are considering. Companies are also discovering the power of working out of tier 2 and tier 3 cities where commute time is much less," he added.

Many companies are discovering that work from home is not a permanent solution to achieving optimum productivity levels and the water cooler chat is irreplaceable.

As Rao says, people at JSW work as a team and that adds to a common purpose. “A work from home culture will not be able to bind so many employees together,” he said.

Real estate in Mumbai is expensive and having a distributed strategy there may not be feasible. But JSW Steel has seven locations, and as a group, 25 locations in India.

“If we work from Vijaynagar, employees will be happy as they will have to travel less. It is less expensive as the colony is next door and has great facility and infrastructure. So not just from cost point of view, but also from employee satisfaction point, it may be better,” Rao pointed out.