Post COVID-19 Thinking: When to Return to the Office?

As Google pushes back its return-to-office date, here’s Big Tech’s post-pandemic thinking

July 2021. That’s when many big technology companies had planned to return to the office. But Google has moved the goal posts to September, and set the stage for instituting a greater degree of flexibility when employees do return.

“We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the company’s employees in an email Sunday, according to the New York Times. “No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid workforce model — though a few are starting to test it — so it will be interesting to try.”

Google, like the rest of Silicon Valley’s big technology companies, has wrestled with how to position and manage employees given the global Covid-19 pandemic. And with cases once again surging — the nation crossed a grim milestone Monday of 300,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus — companies continue to reevaluate when and how to return to the office.

The Business Journal has been keeping track of the office game plan for companies like Facebook, Apple, Splunk and others. Click through the gallery above to learn more about when these companies expect to get their workers back to the office.

Should Silicon Valley’s biggest companies try to return to the office by next summer, or should they extend their timetable to later in 2021 or shift to a remote approach for good? Bizjournals.com took a quick survey. See statistics above. [editorial comment – very small sample]