In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic Google had earlier on decided to allow employees to work from home until the end of 2020, following similar announcements from other major tech companies, and even also went on giving employees who work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic $1,000 allowances to cover equipment costs, CEO Sundar Pichai announced.
Yet the CEO still believes working in offices has value and is not willing to abandon the company “campuses.”
Beginning July 6, “Assuming external conditions allow, we’ll start to open more buildings in more cities,” Pichai wrote in a letter to employees. “This will give Googlers who need to come back to the office—or, capacity permitting, who want to come back—the opportunity to return on a limited, rotating basis (think: one day every couple of weeks, so roughly 10 percent building occupancy).”
The New York Times has now reported on Monday that Alphabet Inc’s Google has extended the return to the office by a few months so it will allow its employees to work from home until September next year.
The company was also testing the idea of a “flexible workweek” once it is safe to return to the office, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told the company’s staff in an email on Sunday, according to the report.
As part of the plan, Google’s employees would be expected to work at least three days a week in the office while working from home the other days, the newspaper report said.
“We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being,” Pichai wrote in the email.
Google was one of the first companies to ask its employees to work from home due to the pandemic. It has previously delayed the timing by when the employees should return to the office from January next year to July.
