Globant Permits Home Work for All 30,000 Workers

Led by founder and CEO Martin Migoya, the tech company Globant has made a revolutionary move by enabling its 30,000 employees, who are located in 33 countries, to work remotely. Globant is one of the biggest tech businesses in the world to support remote work to this extent, so the move is noteworthy. According to Migoya, he understands the value of the workplace as a centre for communication and cooperation as opposed to just a place of employment. "We found that people come, they get together, they use our offices in a different way, and we have been modifying our offices to attend to that new reality," he said.

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.

Globant's 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 the 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.