Daily US Times: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his staff Tuesday that the company will allow some of its workforce to continue working from home indefinitely if they choose.
Dorsey is the first person from a major technology company to announce a new normal that could extend beyond the COVID-19 public health crisis.
The announcement comes as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg urge employees to work from home if possible until 2021. The technology giants have announced plans to reopen their offices soon but are allowing more home working flexibility.
Facebook said it would reopen its offices from 6 July as coronavirus lockdowns around the world are gradually lifted while Google originally said it would keep its work from home policy until 1 June, but is now extending it for seven more months.
Twitter CEO did not say which employees would be eligible to work from home, but says the past months have illustrated that it can be possible.
The social media giant said it had continued to work effectively through the coronavirus lockdown.
The company said in a statement: “Twitter was one of the first companies to go to a work-from-home model in the face of COVID-19, but we don’t anticipate being one of the first to return to offices.”
“The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen. If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return,” the statement adds.
As the coronavirus began to spread across the United States, Twitter began encouraging employees to work from home in early March like other tech companies.
Twitter does not approve business travel and not expect reopen most of its offices until September. The company also canceled all internal events for the rest of this year and possibly into 2021.
Twitter’s statement said: “Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs.”
The move to a more “distributed” workforce had been in the works with Dorsey commenting on more than one occasion that he no longer wanted a workforce concentrated in San Francisco.
In February Dorsey told analysts “our concentration in San Francisco is not serving us any longer and we will strive to be a far more distributed workforce.”
BuzzFeed News first reported the news, which obtained an email Dorsey sent to employees.
You may read: Tesla ordered to keep main US plant closed due to coronavirus
