Google employees can work from home until next June.
Google will let its employees work from home through next June, extending by six months its remote-work plan for the coronavirus pandemic, the company said Monday.
The move makes Google the first major technology company to publicly suggest a specific reopening target so far in the future
Google said CEO Sundar Pichai told workers in an email Monday that the extension of the firm’s global voluntary work from home option till summer 2021 was made “to give employees the ability to plan ahead.” The extension, for workers whose presence in offices is not essential, will help Googlers with families plan for disrupted schooling and will allow workers to move and sign full-year leases if they wish, the company said.
The extension will affect most of Google parent Alphabet’s 200,000 full-time and contract employees, the Mountain View digital advertising giant said, confirming a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company initially had planned for remote working through December.
Major Silicon Valley technology companies have embraced “distributed” work as a solution for keeping workers and the public safe from coronavirus.
San Francisco social media firm Twitter said in May that employees whose jobs allow remote work could continue working from home “forever,” and that nearly all its offices would stay closed until September. Offices will reopen at 20% capacity, the company said.
Mobile payments giant Square, like Twitter a San Francisco company led by CEO Jack Dorsey, has also said employees could work
from home permanently even after pandemic restrictions are lifted.
Also in May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said over the next five to 10 years, half of the social media titan’s employees could be working remotely.
“There are some very clear benefits to remote work,” Zuckerberg said in a post on the platform. “It lets us access talent pools outside of traditional tech hubs in big cities — and that should help spread economic opportunity much more widely around the country and world while also helping us build a more diverse company.”
While the vast majority of Facebook employees have been working remotely, and the company has said its staff could work from home at least through the end of the year, an internal survey showed that more than half the firm’s workers wanted to return to offices as soon as possible, Zuckerberg wrote.
For workers needing or wanting to be in offices, Facebook is imposing social-distancing measures but “we expect to only be able to fit 25% of employees back in the office for much of the rest of this year,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Salesforce, a San Francisco tech behemoth selling business software, said in June it plans to bring workers back to offices in four phases, and that it would allow employees to work remotely until the end of this year if they wished. Plexiglas barriers and temperature checks are part of the company’s re-opening playbook, provided by Salesforce to this news organization.
On Monday, Salesforce said reopening decisions would be unique to each office and decisions would be made on a city-by-city basis, to comply with local guidelines and adhere to the advice of its medical experts and local leadership teams. The company has opened several offices in Europe and Asia, but regardless of whether a work site has reopened, employees can choose to work remotely at least until the end of this year, a Salesforce spokesperson said.
Apple started a phased re-opening plan for its Cupertino “spaceship” headquarters in May, with optional coronavirus testing offered to returning workers, temperature checks required, distancing measures imposed, and some executives coming in, Bloomberg reported in June. The second phase, bringing more workers into Apple offices around the world, was to start this month, according to Bloomberg.
Fremont cybersecurity company Attivo Networks has said it plans to make office work optional after the pandemic, since video-conferencing has proven effective for collaboration.
San Jose artificial-intelligence fraud-prevention firm Signifyd’s human resources head Emily Mikailli said in May it was “only a matter of time” before the company goes fully remote, after shelter-in-place orders showed productivity could be maintained among staff working from home, and substantial savings could be achieved through reducing office space.