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New Business Beginnings: TCS Secure Borderless Workspaces show the way

Posted: 17th July 2020

At Tata Consultancy Services we employ around 448,000 people around the world, of which 19,000 work across the UK and Ireland and around 2,500 work in Scotland. Within three weeks of the pandemic outbreak, almost 95% of our global workforce were able to work from home using our Secure Borderless WorkspacesTM model (SBWS).

SBWS provides TCS employees and customers with a digital workspace with all the connectivity, tools and security required to work remotely. It means that employees can work as normal, collaborate digitally with colleagues and deliver the same services to clients without having to be on-site.

At the start of the pandemic, our employees were understandably concerned, and we have all faced challenges as we’ve adjusted to remote working and balancing additional responsibilities. Supporting our staff’s health and wellbeing is our number one priority. We have introduced a range of benefits including virtual events for children to give their parents a break, medical healthcare services – providing 24/7 access to counselling services – and a virtual engagement team set up by the HR department to promote wellbeing and help keep employees connected.

Our business has adapted with impressive resilience and we are finding that people are collaborating more with increased productivity. Overall, they are happy with working flexible hours and saving daily commuting time that can now be spent working, learning, keeping fit and pursuing hobbies. Our clients are comfortable with the changes we have put in place and want us to take on more work to support with their own challenges.

While the uptick in remote working has been accelerated by the pandemic, TCS was already working in a location independent, agile model. The experiences we have gained during this period are now shaping strategic vision. Our 25×25 strategy, puts agility and flexible workspaces at the heart of our operating model. By 2025 we will only need 25% of our employees in the office at any one time to ensure 100% are productive. Employees will only need to spend 25% of their time at the office, only 25% of a project team will need to physically to be in one location and, based on what we have seen over the last several months, we expect a 25% improvement in productivity and outputs.

This strategy will enable TCS to continue to increase productivity and customer satisfaction by streamlining processes, whilst enabling our staff to work more flexibly. By making the physical location of our staff far less critical to our output, we can facilitate a more dynamic, agile and efficient way of working.

Gopalan Rajagopalan, Head of TCS Scotland

Business Comment

Business Comment is the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s bi-monthly magazine. It provides insight on Edinburgh’s vibrant business community, with features on the city’s key sectors, interviews with leading figures and news on new business developments in the capital.
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