In a fireside chat on the first day of the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2024, the Wipro group promoter said, “Work-life balance is incredibly important. I learned this very early on in my early days before Covid, which is work life is something that you have to define for yourself, organizations are never going to work at it for you. So you have to define what it means and draw boundaries.”
The comments come days after Wipro’s cross-city rival Infosys’ founder NR Narayana Murthy reiterated his stance on the 70-hour work-week, stating that he does not believe in the concept of ‘work-life balance’. He also expressed disappointment over India’s shift from a six-day to a five-day workweek in 1986.
According to Premji, the concept of work-life has dramatically changed as earlier it would have meant what time you came or left the office but today it may be not to take away the “Instagram access at work.”
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“The concept of what it means is simply not ours, it is also the freedom of what I can do with my time while at work, but not working,” Premji added.
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Hybrid model and mental health
While several IT services companies in India had moved to a hybrid working model post Covid, several companies including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, have started calling their employees return to office more than before. Although many firms continue to remain flexible.
Premji said, “The one model that IT industry has adopted, and I think the government has been supportive of is a more hybrid model of work. It is a controversial subject. But we, as a company, have said, we won’t be able to come three days a week, but we want you to have the flexibility of having two days on your work place. That certainly helps with the workforce.”
On being asked about work-life balance and mental health of employees, Premji said that it was remarkable and good news that companies are talking about the taboo topic more publicly, especially after the pandemic in 2020.
At Wipro, he said they train managers to be sensitive to people, to look for signs and how to have these conversations openly. “I think are very powerful,” Premji said.
India tech capital and AI
Speaking of his own journey, Premji said it’s okay to not be okay and it helped him to focus on sleeping right, exercising and eating right.
On the skills required amid the tectonic shift in technology, Premji said going forward the ability to unlearn will be important and also the agility and speed with which you can adapt and change is going to be critical.
Calling India the tech capital of the world, he said that the subtle yet profound change came after Covid when people came to India for the talent and not just because we are cheap.
“I find more and more as you talk to stakeholders and customers, they are shifting their decision making. They are shifting their action into India. It’s not simply a low-cost destination. They will say, walk the corridors of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. Don’t walk the corridors of New York and London… So really, it’s become a lot easier today to be relevant on the global map than it ever was before,” Premji added.
The artificial intelligence (AI) disruption, he believes will see an evolution and the pickup of the technology by companies will go through a journey.
“Customers are still very much in experimentation mode. Customers are POC with the technology. Are they moving to scale production? Yet, arguably, no. Are more and more customers moving from piloting to production? The answer is yes,” Premji said.
Like most industry experts, Premji added that there will need to be human intervention in certain tasks in our job while some can be much better done by a machine.
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