Google to keep most of its employees at home until July 2021
SAN RAMON, California (AP) — Google has decided that most of its 200,000 employees and contractors should work from home through next June, a sobering assessment of the pandemic’s potential staying power from the company providing the answers for the world’s most trusted Internet search engine.
The remote-work order issued Monday (July 27) by Google CEO Sundar Pichai also affects other companies owned by Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc. It marks a six-month extension of Google’s previous plan to keep most of its offices closed through the rest of this year.
“I know this extended timeline may come with mixed emotions and I want to make sure you’re taking care of yourselves,” wrote Pichai, who is also Alphabet’s CEO, in an e-mail to employees.
Pichai’s decision was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Even before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, Google and many other prominent tech firms had been telling their employees to work from home.
Google had originally planned to allow a significant number of employees to begin returning to its Mountain View, California, headquarters and other offices during the summer. But the pandemic’s ongoing spread prompted Google to push back the reopening until January and now it has prompted yet another delay.
“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 wrote.
Pichai’s email noted that Google and Alphabet have been able to reopen some offices in 42 countries, although he didn’t specify which.
But new guidelines mean Google’s biggest offices will remain largely unoccupied through June 2021.
