By Eamonn Burke
Google has just announced that it will keep its employees working from home until July 2021, extending the previous mandate that was set to end after 2020. According to a spokesman, the reasoning by Google CEO Sundar Pichai for this extension was “To give employees the ability to plan ahead” and to help them “balance work with taking care of yourselves.” Certain employees, as stated in the previous plan, will be allowed to return sooner. Google has also partially opened some offices in other countries, although the extension applies to all major offices in places like the U.K and India.
Over 200,000 employees, across Google and its parent company Alphabet, will be affected by the decision made by Pichai last week after a conference with Google Leads.
Although other major tech companies like Microsoft and Apple still promise to bring employees back this year, the move is predicted to influence many similar companies to move in a similar direction as Google. The CEO of one such company, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, expects that they will begin to move permanently toward remote work.
