Meesho announces flexible-work model; employees will have to relocate

On December 16, 2022, Meesho, a SoftBank-backed e-commerce platform, announced that starting June 1, 2023, it will adopt a flexible work office model. To enforce this and make the transition smooth, Meesho will cover  relocation expenses, which will include travel, brokerage of real estate, readmission into schools, and sponsored day-care facilities for children under the age of six.

To adopt this flexible model, they will give up their work-from-anywhere policy, which was announced in February.

In a press statement, Meesho said, “In a recently conducted survey, the majority of our employees expressed the need for more in-person connections to foster collaboration, live our culture of speedy execution, and form informal bonds,”

At the time when the company had announced the work-from-anywhere policy, Vidit Aatrey, founder and chief executive officer of Meesho,  said, “Leaders need to acknowledge that employees’ psychological and physical safety is more important than their location of work.”

IIT Delhi alumni Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal co-founded Meesho in 2015. The company started as a social commerce platform where people could sell and list their products. Now the platform has completely turned into a proper e-commerce platform for shopping.

Ashish Kumar Singh, chief human resource officer at Meesho, said: “This move is rooted in our culture of proactively soliciting and acting upon employee feedback. Our internal surveys reflect that while a boundary-less set-up has shown advantages like higher productivity, employees almost unanimously agree that we can further enhance team bonding and collaboration (especially for new hires), quicker brainstorming, and speed of execution.”

In the recent statement, Meesho also added, “Employees will come to the office one day a week and can continue to work remotely for the rest of the week.”