The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s 200,000 employees will continue to work from home another full year to prevent the spread of the Chinese virus. Other Silicon Valley companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have already begun to explore remote working options.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, nearly 200,000 Google employees have been asked to continue working from home for at least another year.
“I know it hasn’t been easy,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. “I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months.”
Pichai said that the decision was motivated by plans to keep public schools closed in California. As a result of those decisions, many Google employees will be forced to help their children with at-home instruction.
“We are still learning a lot from our experiences of working from home and will use that knowledge to inform our approach to the future of work at Google,” Pichai added.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took it a step further when he recently announced that nearly half of Facebook’s staff will be working from their homes in the next decade.
Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey told employees in May that they are permitted to work from home permanently if they so choose.
“We want employees to be able to work where they feel most creative and productive,” a Square spokesperson said. “Squares will be able to work from home permanently, even once offices begin to reopen.”
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