Tech giant Globant, led by founder and CEO Martin Migoya, has made a ground-breaking, allowing its 30,000 employees spread across 33 countries to work from home. The move is significant, as Globant is one of the largest tech companies globally to embrace work from home on such a scale. According to Buenos Aires Times, Mr Migoya appreciates in-person work but it happened "without putting a gun to the head of anybody". The entrepreneur said he recognises the importance of office as a hub for connection and collaboration, rather than a workspace.
"We found that people come, they get together, they use our offices in a different way, and we've been modifying our offices to attend to that new reality," the outlet quoted him as saying.
Mr Migoya's team has redesigned the offices post-pandemic, replacing individual desks with more round tables that fit several people, while creating extra lounge space.
The same philosophy was echoed by Patricia Pomies, the company's global CEO.
"Was remote work really a mistake? Do we need a fixed amount of days to go to the office? I would not go as far as saying people lack inspiration when working from home. At Globant, we firmly believe in autonomy and in giving flexibility to every team to decide how they work best," she had said on X last month.
"Most times, people from the same POD are not even in the same country. As a tech company, having a digital office and remote working is simply baseline common sense," she had further said.
The CEO, however, said the culture of her company is such that employees find it "valuable" to meet in-person, not because they are told to.
Globan't decision is in contrast with the approach of Apple, Alphabet Inc's Google, Microsoft Corp and Meta, which have all adopted policies to bring employees back to their desks. In India too, the issue has generated a lot of debate.
In India, Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath said earlier this month that remote office concept did not work for some of his employees and proved challenging for those in tech, business, and decision-making positions due to communication barriers. He also noted that ever since some of his staff started returning to office on a hybrid basis, the results have been "dramatically positive".
In January, IBM had delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company.
