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Google Employees Will Work From Home Until Summer 2021

Google and its parent company, Alphabet, will keep its employees working from home until at least June 2021 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the company said in a statement Monday to CBS MoneyWatch. 

The Mountain View, California-based tech giant had previously planned on bringing workers back to its offices beginning in January, and is now the first major U.S. Corporation to firmly extend its work-from-home timeline so far into the future. 

"To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through June 30, 2021, for roles that don't need to be in the office," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in an email to employees.

The new policy affects almost all of the roughly 200,000 full-time and contract workers for Google and Alphabet's various divisions. 

Pichai made the decision with those employees who are parents in mind, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Many adults with children could find themselves juggling dual tasks of working and also instructing their children from home in the fall and well into the academic year if local schools don't revert to in-person learning. 

Former Google exec says a "reimagining" of th... 07:17

Other major corporations are expected to follow Google's lead. Google's tech peers Amazon, Apple and Facebook, for instance, have said they are planning on bringing back at least some workers to their offices in January. 

The major outlier is Twitter, which is allowing employees to work from home indefinitely, if they so choose. 

Google Reportedly Tells Employees To Keep Working From Home Until July 2021

Google is telling almost all of its full-time and contract workers to continue working from home until at least July 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Monday morning report from the Wall Street Journal.

The move makes Google the first major American corporation to formally initiate such an extended period for remote work, according to the Journal, and could sway other companies to act similarly. Google had previously said employees could expect to come back to the office in January.

The decision will apply to almost all of the company’s 200,000 workers, according to the Journal.

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, reportedly wrote in a note to staff Monday that he hoped the longer remote work period would offer “the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months.”

Pichai made the decision in part because many families are facing uncertain school semesters that could see a mix of remote and in-person instruction, and so that workers could choose to live elsewhere for the next year, according to the Journal.

Google isn’t the only company that appears to be embracing the work-from-home mentality. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that he believes as much as half of the social media network’s employees could be fully remote in the next five to 10 years.

“We and a lot of other folks were very worried that productivity was going to really fall off a cliff,” Zuckerberg said in May. “It just hasn’t. We are at least as productive as we were before, and some people report being even more productive.”

Meanwhile, Twitter and Square, both run by CEO Jack Dorsey, have announced that their employees can work remotely permanently if they’d like, and Canadian e-commerce company Shopify has said it will allow its 5,000 staff to work from home indefinitely, according to Bloomberg News.

At Google, Pichai wrote that “We are still learning a lot from our experiences of working from home and will use that knowledge to inform our approach to the future of work at Google.”

Jaclyn Reiss can be reached at jaclyn.Reiss@globe.Com. Follow her on Twitter: @JaclynReiss

Google Won't Reopen Offices Until July 2021

 James Martin/CNET For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO website.

Google won't reopen offices for many employees amid the coronavirus pandemic until next summer. CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday told employees that the search giant will extend its work from home option through June 30, 2021, for roles that don't need to be in an office. 

The move, earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal, will impact nearly all of the tech giant's roughly 200,000 full-time and contract employees.

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Earlier this month, Google delayed the reopening of its US offices after coronavirus cases surged in several states. CEO Sundar Pichai previously said the search giant would start bringing workers back as of July 6, but then said offices will remain closed until at least Sept. 7.

As at many companies, employees at Google have been working from home to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Back in May, Pichai told employees that they'll likely work remotely for the rest of 2020. The Google CEO reportedly made the decision to further push back opening offices last week, in part due to uncertainty around school years. 

As of Monday, the US has recorded more than 4 million confirmed cases, with over 146,000 deaths. Globally, there are over 16 million confirmed cases, according to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 database.