Globant SA's office culture for 30,000 employees defies return-to-office trend: ‘Without putting a gun to the head…’

livemint.com:

Globant Chief Executive Officer Martin Migoya is choosing not to adopt a return-to-office policy for his nearly 30,000 employees across 33 countries, making the software giant one of the world’s largest tech companies by headcount to remain fully remote. It’s not that Migoya doesn’t appreciate in-person work. He’s been adding office space post-pandemic and employees are coming back, he said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.

But it has happened “without putting a gun to the head of anybody," he said. Migoya said his initial impulse was: “Let’s make everybody come back." But he’s settled on a softer sell that includes making offices more flexible and welcoming. “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," he said.

Migoya’s teams redesigned the offices post-pandemic, replacing individual desks with more round tables that fit several people, while creating extra lounge space and phonebooth-style work stations for private meetings. Globant’s lack of return-to-office policy contrasts with the approach of Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc., which have all adopted policies to bring employees back to their desks.

Even e-commerce behemoth MercadoLibre Inc., which was also founded in Argentina, requires its managers to spend 20% of their time in the office per quarter, according to a spokeswoman. In the US, where Globant has seven offices, businesses are seeing attendance rates at 63% of pre-pandemic levels. New York and Miami lead the pack, with levels near 80%.