White-Collar Companies Race to Be Last to Return to the Office
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Capital One and others are extending work-from-home policies to September and sometimes far beyond.
Credit...Jackson Gibbs
By
David Streitfeld
- May 8, 2020, 2:38 p.m. ET
Even as President Trump
has said “we have to get our country open again,” much of corporate America is in no rush to return employees to their campuses and skyscrapers. The companies are racing not to be the first back, but the last.
the coronavirus pandemic will evolve. While
deaths from the virus in hot zones like New York City have come down, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere. Almost every day, there are at least 20,000 new cases in the U.S., bringing the country’s total to more than 1.2 million.
Some companies said there is another reason: Working from home is working out well.
“Working from home is a great thing for the company and for the employees, who don’t want to get back in cars and commute for two hours. That’s lost productivity,” said Joan Burke, the chief people officer of DocuSign, a San Francisco tech company that enables electronic agreements. “I see it happening way more often in the future.”
until May 31, its governor, Gavin Newsom, has said.
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; about 2 percent worked from home full time. In a matter of days, the pandemic pushed telecommuting from marginal to mandatory in many parts of the country.
Now, even as states like Georgia and Illinois roll out phased re-openings, companies see a future for remote work. Gartner, the research firm and consultant, said its clients — mostly large firms that have little direct interaction with the public — expected as many as half their employees to work at home at least part time.
tweeted his emphatic support for working from home
late last month, a critic responded by quoting a post from the employment rating site Glassdoor that “the constant check-ins, daily reports and hours of meetings a day make it impossible to get your job completed.”
telecommuting was invented by Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer, in 1973. It originally was not about working from home, which was largely impossible before the commercial internet was developed in the late 1990s. Instead, people would go to convenient satellite offices to reduce commuting time.
it went up, but he has mixed feelings about the current situation. While Covid-19 may help banish the stigma, he said, he doubted that working from home five days a week would grow much.
the San Francisco company plans to take as much time as necessary to determine any changes for its 2,000 employees.
“It’s easier to manage a company that is 100 percent remote than one where employees are 50 percent remote and 50 percent in the office,” said Robby Kwok, Slack’s senior vice president for people.
That’s because completely virtual companies need to write everything down for employees. Companies that combine the two approaches risk that some employees are more informed than others.
And in a world where crowds are now dangerous, Slack can help workers stay safe by keeping them at home. The earliest employees will return to the office is September, Mr. Kwok said.
“We have this community obligation to be the last to go back,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/...action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
