Google Hybrid Work Model Requires Staff to Spend 3 Days a Week in the Office as COVID-19 Restrictions Ease

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 06 May 2021, 11:05 am

Google expects 60% of its 140,000 global employees to spend at least three days in the office every week post-pandemic.

The policy was announced in a company-wide memo by CEO Sundar Pichai, which was attached to several tweets and published on numerous blog posts.

Google's New Work Schedule

While Pichai stated that the majority of employees will come into the office three days a week, while 20% of the employees are expected to work from home permanently. The other 20% are currently working from new office locations.

The search giant is the latest tech company to announce massive chances to its working culture post-pandemic, according to The Verge.

Microsoft will allow employees to freely work from home for up to 50% of the working week or work remotely regularly with their manager's approval.

Also Read: Struggling to Work At Home? These Apps That Will Improve Your Productivity at Work!

Meanwhile, Salesforce, the owner of Slack, has declared that the 9-to-5 workday is dead, with most of its employees coming into the office between one and three days a week.

Twitter and Facebook have announced similar plans to let employees work from home or work remotely indefinitely.

While Google stated that most of its employees will work from the office around 3 days a week, it also says it will make it easier for employees to switch between offices or work fully remotely.

Employees will be able to apply to move offices with their manager's approval or work entirely remotely. Meanwhile, a work-from-anywhere weeks policy will let Googlers temporarily work from places that are outside their main office for up to four weeks a year.

Pichai stated that Google will provide more details on the changes by mid-June, around the same time it is introducing the process to allow employees to request office moves.

Pichai's memo also mentions the company's experiments with future hybrid workplaces.

A report from The New York Times outlined some of the design elements being explored, including inflatable robot walls to create temporary divides between open-plan desks and a fabric-based overhead air duct system that can be unzipped moved over a weekend to create new seating arrangements.

Google's employees across North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa were told to work from home in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last month, Google's US offices opened on a limited basis, with employees asked to follow safety guidelines like wearing masks and practicing social distancing if they wanted to come in.

In his memo, Pichai says that in places where Google has opened its offices, almost 60% of employees have chosen to come back in.

Post-Pandemic Work Environment

According to Forbes, Randstad's COVID-19 Surveillance Report shows that 78% of companies found that remote work was more effective than they thought it would be, and studies overall have found that productivity has remained the same or even improved as employees worked from home.

The change from office work to working from home was so successful that massive companies like Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Square, and now Google announced that some or all of their staff can work from home on an indefinite or even permanent basis.