- Globant, a software company with nearly 30,000 employees, is letting its workers stay fully remote.
- The CEO told Bloomberg he’s focused on making offices more enticing than enforcing RTO.
- It makes Globant an outlier in the tech world, where some major companies have strict RTO policies.
While many tech companies have enforced workers’ return to the office, software company Globant is allowing its nearly 30,000 employees to remain fully remote.
But the policy hasn’t meant that its offices are empty, instead, employees have been drawn back to the office more flexibly, Globant CEO Martin Migoya told Bloomberg.
The company opted to entice workers back by expanding and updating office space — with more lounge areas and private rooms for remote calls.
“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,” Migoya told the outlet.
“The office must be an attraction point for the people to get together, rather than just the desk in which you do your job,” he added.
The company has nearly 70 offices across the world, including seven in the US.
Other companies haven’t been so favorable on remote work and have enforced RTO mandates for at least part of the working week. This includes Apple, Meta, and Google.
Last year, Amazon doubled down on its strict RTO policy and brought in rules that allowed managers to fire employees who didn’t meet the in-office requirements and created internal dashboards to track employee office attendance.
While Dell told employees that if they went fully remote, they would not be considered for promotion.
Those who enforce RTO mandates say that it boosts productivity and facilitates collaboration, improving the company’s bottom line.
But others say it can have the opposite effect. A recent study on S&P 500 firms by researchers at the Katz Graduate School of Business found that companies with strict RTO mandates aren’t more profitable, and workers aren’t necessarily more productive either.
Instead, these policies can cause a “massive disruption” to employees’ lives, Dan Schawbel, a future-of-work expert, previously told Business Insider.
“They made big decisions, especially millennials who had moved, they bought a house, they settled down, they had kids,” he said.
These mandates are unattractive to workers who have “already invested so much time and emotion and energy into their decision to move or have flexibility,” he added.
