Women workers lead in strong comeback of office trends in India

Bengaluru: Led by women workers, India is showing a strong return-to-office trend and the number of people returning to work in November has risen to 10 per cent of pre-COVID levels, a new report revealed on Thursday.

Overall, 375 per cent more people returned to office in November as compared to April in the country.

Based on the data collected from more than 4 lakh employees across the country, the report by hybrid workplace solutions provider WorkInSync and employee transport solutions service MoveInSync said that Mumbai and Delhi-NCR lead the 'return-to-office' trends, currently at greater than 20 per cent of pre-COVID levels.

Bengaluru and Hyderabad are currently at less than 5 per cent of pre-COVID levels among the metro cities.

However, 20 per cent workforce in the rest of India has returned to offices compared to 10 per cent in Metros to pre-COVID levels.

The data suggested that women employees are way ahead of their male counterparts in the effort to get back to office.

While the rate of return to office is faster for women than men, overall ratio of women vs men remains low at 0.53 vs 0.72 pre-COVID.

"The data clearly shows that India wants to get back to business as usual very quickly. The index is also indicating the fact that with the hope of a vaccine in 2021, return-to-office levels in IT, ITeS & BPO sector could potentially reach 50 per cent of pre-COVID levels by May 2021 and up to 80 per cent by September," said Deepesh Agarwal, CEO of WorkInSync.

Companies in Pharma sector (27 per cent) and IT, ITeS and BPO sector (16 per cent) are returning to office at a faster rate, compared to pure-play software product companies (3 per cent).

"Since the phase II of re-opening, there has been a consistent upward shift in the way employees have returned back to work and that trend will pick up pace in the next few months," Agarwal said.