Rishad Premji wants Wipro staff back in office — Here's why

He said employees leave and stay because there is connectedness or lack of connectedness

IT major Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji on Wednesday expressed his wish to bring all the company's employees back to office for some time.

Speaking at the Nasscom Product Conclave 2022, Premji recalled how challenging it was to build connectedness within the organisation in the post-pandemic era.

"So, it's a huge challenge because you know, how do you build a sense of belonging to an organisation? Many of these people (new recruits) simply get a paycheck from the company, (and) they engage with a few of their leaders, typically on a collaborative medium," said Premji during the session titled 'Leadership lessons for startups'.

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He said employees stay or leave because there is connectedness or lack of connectedness.

However, he also added a caveat saying that the company would want to be flexible even as it tries to bring back its employees who have been working in a hybrid system ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We also want to be agile. We can't be dogmatic and fixated about that. You have to be quite adaptive in terms of how this evolves," he added.

Premji said one of the things that new companies should look out for is connectedness. "...especially if you're a young company, if you're a startup, with 30-40 people and you're all basically in the same city and you are not coming together then I think you're missing out on an amazing chemistry that can be built."

Values over valuations

On startups, he said successful businesses should look to focus on building and integrating strong values within the organisation. "I would say, focus on building valuable businesses versus valuation. I find this (focus on unicorn status and how much you are valued at) as an obsession today."

He said that in reality the journey to building sustainable businesses is long, complex and sometimes slow. "And if your journey is to make money quickly, the kind of organisation you will build will be very different than an organisation that you want to last," he added.