Driving Digital Transformation

IMPLEMENTATION OF SBWS IN TCS

Rajani J Nair | MLVUCA | Roll No: - 2019B1PGPMX025

Abstract
The global COVID-19 pandemic has challenged companies to manage their enterprises in
new found ways. In the short term, they’re facing enormous scope of changes to their
business plans. Expected change can be hard enough in ordinary circumstances however
leading forced change management for an organization, all while being virtual, can be
even harder. However, in order to cope up with such external factors such as COVID-19
and in order to ensure that the Business Continuity Plan of the organization is in place it
is necessary for any organization to effectively implement change management techniques
to handle such crisis. The following analysis is one such example of my organization which
is “Tata Consultancy Services” who introduced the program of Secure Borderless
Workspaces™ (SBWS™) model, which allowed TCS associates to work from home with
support from minimal associates working from offices. It will also highlight the efficiency
of the company in successfully implementing the organization wide change within a short
span of time and thereby having a successful record of attaining its goal of digital
transformation by adopting the right strategies.

Introduction
The outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus has forced us to rethink the way we work and
run our business, in a brutal way. Working from home has brought many disruptive
changes to the way we work: changes in tools, routines, managing stress levels, managing
remote teams, etc. However, for TCS the safety and well-being of its employees was the
top priority Their priority was to safeguard the health and well-being of their 446,000
associates in the 46 countries where they operated, while continuing to support mission
critical IT backbones globally. Initially they took proactive measures like travel
restrictions, cancellation of events and large internal meetings, and safe working
environments and processes, which helped to minimize the impact. However, we are
living in a world where technology is embedded in every aspect of our lives. As a leading
technology provider, TCS was working with more than 1,000 organizations across the
world to keep them up and running. The smooth functioning of all these organizations
was vital during a period of lockdown and social distancing. TCS has been a pioneer in
location independent work practices for the last 50 years. TCS has proactively deployed
collaboration platforms, cloud enabled infrastructure and robust security practices, which
positioned itself well to deal with this unprecedent situation. Thus, in order to maintain
its valuable relationship with all its clients and without compromising the safety of its
employees the need for an organization-wide change intervention was much required.
This gave rise to the program of Secure Borderless Workspaces™ (SBWS™) which was very
much vital to be implemented in order to cope up the crisis due to COVID-19 and ensure
the Business continuity plan of the organization is in place. Following content will

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highlight on the Planning, Communicating & successful implementation the SBWS model
across all offices of TCS spread across 46 countries.

Implementing the Change

In the case of TCS the reason for planning the need for change was due to the
environmental conditions arisen due to COVID-19 and also due to the policies
implemented by the government to ensure social distancing is in place and the lockdown
gets implemented to control the spread. TCS had followed the process-based change
model in which the sequence of steps to bring about the change was completely analyzed.
It had adopted a strategy in order to initiate, manage & stabilize the change process. The
model was implemented in the following stages as follows: -

Unfreezing: - This was the first phase of the change implementation process wherein the
HR team had conducted wide range of activities in order to understand the employee’s
views towards the implementation of change. The activities included surveys which
primarily focused in understanding the assertiveness of employees to adapt to the SBWS
platform. It also enabled in gathering data of an employee’s living conditions This phase
also included TCS to inform its clients about the change to be planned and it was essential
to get client’s approval before planning the implementation of the change.

Changing: -. In this phase all the issues wherein employees raised concerns regarding the
asset availability, infra related issues all were addressed as per priority. Any stage wherein
it was identified that the work is getting affected was immediately addressed and all
employee’s asset movement was initiated at utmost priority. Thus, implementation of
SBWS platform was initiated smoothly without any hurdles.

Refreezing: - During this phase the implemented change was required to be stabilized by
allowing the employees to integrate to the new environment. During this phase many
aspects of the change implemented were analyzed and accordingly action was
implemented.

The above change model implemented was a digital transformation in the company with
the help of HR intervention wherein there were lot of changes in various organization
areas such as policies, technology, security etc. After the successful implementation of
SBWS TCS has already made an announcement that post COVID 75% of 4.5 lakh TCS
employees to permanently work from home. This decision was made after the firm briskly
moved 90% of its workforce to an operating model called Secured Borderless Workspace.

Thus, based on the above change model implemented by TCS although the need for
change was due to COVID this change intervention has helped TCS to adopt the new
model for 90% of its workforce thus saving large amount of money on space,

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infrastructure etc. without compromising on the quality and productivity of the service
provided.

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