Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) Chairman and Managing Director, SN Subrahmanyan, has once again sparked debate — this time for his comments on the reluctance of employees of the Information Technology (IT) field to return to office work.
Speaking at the CII South Global Linkages summit in Chennai, Subrahmanyan highlighted a major shift in workplace culture, where today’s professionals, particularly in the IT sector, increasingly prefer remote work over traditional office setups, said a report by the Economic Times.
Subrahmanyan pointed out that, unlike previous generations, today’s engineering graduates, especially in IT, are often unwilling to relocate for work.
“When I joined L&T as a graduate engineer, my boss said if you are from Chennai, you go to Delhi and work. But today, if I ask a person from Chennai to work out of Delhi, he says bye. It’s a different world of work today, and we have to see how to make HR policies flexible,” said Subrahmanyan.
This trend, he noted, is making talent distribution across locations more challenging, as companies struggle to bring employees back to office spaces. He acknowledged that senior leadership — especially from older generations — often finds it difficult to understand this evolving work culture.
While discussing workforce trends, Subrahmanyan also compared this reluctance in IT to the ongoing labour shortage in the construction sector.
He attributed the latter to government welfare schemes such as Jan Dhan accounts, direct benefit transfers (DBTs), Garib Kalyan Yojana, and MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee), which provide financial stability and reduce the urgency for workers to migrate for employment.
Backlash over work-culture remarks
It might be noted that Subrahmanyan has previously faced criticism for his views on workplace expectations.
In an earlier statement, he expressed regret over not being able to make employees work on Sundays, controversially questioning how long they could continue "staring at their wife" instead of coming to the office.
