Swiggy to implement 'work from anywhere' policy

Online food delivery aggregator Swiggy, on Friday announced it will be moving to a permanent remote work policy for the majority of roles, at a time when companies are returning back to office spaces as the pandemic recedes.    

The corporate, central business functions and technology teams at the unicorn will continue to work remotely and converge once every quarter at their base location for a week to promote in-person bonding under the new policy, Swiggy said in a statement.    

The decision was arrived at based on team needs and feedback from several managers and employees who vouched for the flexibility and increased productivity working from home has given them in the last two years. 

However, employees in partner-facing roles have to work from the office for a few days a week from their base locations.   

Currently, Swiggy employees are working out of 487 cities in 27 states and 4 union territories across the country, according to a company statement. 

The SoftBank and Prosus-backed platform follows suit with a list of other companies moving to remote working. Recently, Meesho, NoBroker, Magicpin, Spinny and Zerodha also announced similar permanent work from home setups.    

“Our focus was to enable employees with as much flexibility in their work life within the contours of their job. We observed global and local talent trends while also holding our ears to the ground listening to the pulse of employees, managers and leaders. This led us to introducing ‘work from anywhere’ as a permanent option for employees,” said Girish Menon, head of human resources, Swiggy.   

Swiggy, operated by Bundl Technologies Pvt. Ltd, raised $700 million in a funding round led by Invesco, earlier in January. The fundraise valued Swiggy at $10.7 billion, which is double its last valuation in July, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Earlier this month, Swiggy appointed Rohit Kapoor as the head of its food delivery business, VCCircle had reported. Kapoor, who is currently Oyo’s global chief marketing officer, will be Swiggy’s first chief executive officer of its food delivery business. He will report to founder and CEO Sriharsha Majety.

The unicorn agreed to acquire Times Internet-owned table booking platform Dineout in May, in a deal valued at about $150 million, said a person familiar with the matter.    

Last month, Swiggy announced buyback of shares up to $23 million issued under its employee stock option plan (Esop). This is part of Swiggy's two-year Esop liquidity program worth $35-40 million that was rolled out in October last year. The next round of ESOP liquidity under this program will be held in July next year.

Swiggy also launched a new program - Build Your Own Dollar (BYOD) - to allow its employees across the company to invest in Esops.