WFH Ya Office? Sach Kya Hai?

“If work from home was so successful, why are people growing at the pace they’re growing? Why is India doing 80 million square feet?”

The CEO of RMZ Office and RMZ NXT was answering a question about the wave of WFH that came after COVID. His response was not the standard one. He did not defend the office on cultural grounds. He went straight to the empirical data.

80 million square feet of commercial real estate is what Indian corporates absorb in a typical year. If WFH worked at scale, this number would be much lower. Companies would be hiring people without leasing office space for them. They would be growing headcount without growing footprint. The fact that the office market is expanding at this rate is the empirical evidence that WFH did not replace the office.

Let me walk you through what else he said.

The Historical Context

The most useful framing in the segment was the historical one.

“Work from home has always been there. 15, 20 percent used to always. Most organisations used to keep a 15, 20 percent headcount buffer. If they needed 100 seats, they hired 125.”

This is the part of the debate that almost everyone misses. WFH was not invented in 2020. Companies routinely had 15 to 20 percent of their workforce working from home on any given day, due to a mix of personal circumstances, parental responsibilities, illness, and operational flexibility.

The infrastructure capacity was sized accordingly. A company needing 100 seats on average would hire 125 people. The 25 extra could be accommodated through the natural WFH rotation. The system was designed for this. The number was 15 to 20 percent.

The pandemic moved the number from 15-20 percent to 100 percent for a period of 18 to 24 months. This was an emergency response to a public health crisis, not a redesign of how work happens.

The Reversion

The reversion to the office was not a corporate conspiracy or a managerial reflex.

“Today, most companies are back to work from office only. If you look at most of the banks, most of the large Indian companies, they’ve all brought back their employees.”

The Indian banking sector was the first to fully return. The large technology services companies followed. The Global Capability Centres followed them. By 2024, the office attendance pattern in Indian corporates was back to roughly the pre-COVID baseline.

Thirumal’s framing of this was balanced.

“That 15, 20 percent churn will always be there for people to work from home. I’m not saying it’s a bad or a good trend.”

The point is empirical, not moral. WFH at 15-20 percent is the steady-state equilibrium. WFH at higher levels has not held in Indian corporate practice.

The 80 Million Square Feet Argument

The killer line in the segment was the data point that anchors the entire argument.

“If work from home was so successful, why is India doing 80 million square feet?”

Indian commercial real estate absorption has been in the 70 to 90 million square feet range for several years. The market is growing, not shrinking. The corporates absorbing this space are the same ones that publicly discuss hybrid work arrangements.

The implication is that the publicly stated hybrid policy and the actual workforce behaviour are diverging. The corporates are saying they support flexibility while leasing space that suggests they expect their workforce in the office.

This is not necessarily duplicity. It is the structural reality that growth requires offices. A company that expects to triple its headcount over five years cannot triple its WFH count and remain functional. It needs space for the new workforce.

The Hub-And-Spoke Experiment

The honest acknowledgment in the segment was that real corporate experimentation with alternatives did happen.

“People tried hub and spoke. We will give office space in everybody’s residential location. If they need anything, they can go and take calls there. Didn’t work.”

Hub and spoke was the most serious alternative to the traditional office. The idea was that the company would maintain a small central headquarters and distributed smaller offices in residential areas where employees could work without long commutes. This was tried by several major Indian corporates in 2021 and 2022.

It did not work. The cultural reason was that culture cannot be built across distributed small offices. The operational reason was that the distributed offices were never used at scale by the employees they were built for. The infrastructure existed. The behaviour did not show up.

The Culture Argument

The deepest argument in the segment was about culture.

“Culture has to be created only when you see each other.”

This is the part of the WFH debate that is hardest to quantify but most important to understand. The culture of a company is built through repeated incidental interactions, observation of how senior people make decisions, organic mentorship across hierarchy levels, and the slow accumulation of trust that comes from being in the same room.

None of this is impossible over video calls. It is just dramatically harder. The new employee who joins a team and never sees their team in person takes longer to internalise the culture. The senior leader whose mentorship happens over scheduled video calls is less impactful than one whose mentorship includes a thousand small unscheduled interactions.

Thirumal’s framing was that this is a cultural reality that Indian corporates have implicitly recognised by bringing employees back.

The GCC Naming Pattern

The bonus insight in the segment was about the GCC label that drives so much of Indian commercial real estate growth today.

“Every boom has been given a name. Before when it was call centres, then it became technology. Now GCC.”

This is the sociology-of-business observation that is rare in industry commentary. Indian back-office work for global companies has had three branding eras. In the 1990s, it was call centres. The label was operational. In the 2000s, it became technology services. The label was upgraded. In the 2020s, it has become Global Capability Centres. The label is now strategic.

Thirumal’s reframe was direct.

“A GCC is a culmination of BPO, KPO, and technology under one roof. Before it used to be the KPO, BPO sat with somebody else, the tech sat on somebody else. Now they’re putting them all under one roof and calling them a global capability centre.”

The work has not fundamentally changed. The packaging has. The consolidation under one roof is real, and it has operational efficiencies. The new name is doing the work of making something familiar sound new.

“Why a capability centre? Because you’re creating different aspects of the business in one place.”

The “capability” framing is what allows the GCC narrative to position India as a strategic centre rather than a delivery centre. The framing matters for global executive perception. It also drives the office demand that produces the 80 million square feet number.

The Broader Implication

The implications go beyond real estate.

For corporate leaders thinking about return-to-office policies, the segment is a useful reminder that the data is more settled than the public debate suggests. The companies that have brought their employees back have done so because the alternatives did not work, not because of nostalgia for the old model.

For HR leaders thinking about flexible work policies, the framework is that 15-20 percent WFH is the natural equilibrium. Higher numbers have not held. Lower numbers ignore the legitimate needs that the 15-20 percent buffer was designed to address.

For investors thinking about Indian commercial real estate, the 80 million square feet number is the data point that anchors the long-term thesis. The absorption is growing. The demand is structural. The WFH risk to the office market is more limited than the public discourse implies.

For startup founders and SaaS operators selling into Indian enterprises, the segment provides a useful filter. If you are pitching a product that depends on remote-first work assumptions, you may be designing for a market that does not actually exist in India at scale.

The Universal Pattern

The naming pattern Thirumal identified for GCC is itself a useful lens for analysing any industry trend.

Call centres became technology became GCC. The label tracks the prestige of the work, not the work itself. The work has evolved, but more continuously than the labels suggest.

The same pattern operates in many sectors. Outsourcing became managed services became digital transformation became AI implementation. The underlying activity is more continuous than the labels suggest. The labels are doing the work of making something familiar sound new.

This is not a critique. The label changes can be useful. They signal evolution. They reposition the work in the global executive imagination. They drive demand for the latest version of the activity.

But for analysts trying to understand what is actually happening, the labels are misleading. The continuity is more important than the discontinuity. The 1990s call centre work and the 2020s GCC work are more similar than different, just performed at a higher level of sophistication in larger consolidated facilities.

What I Took Away

Three things from this segment will stay with me.

The 80 million square feet argument. The single most data-driven critique of the WFH narrative.

The historical baseline. WFH was not new in 2020. The 15-20 percent baseline always existed.

The GCC naming reframe. The label has changed across three decades. The work has been more continuous than the labels suggest.

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