Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter are encouraging workers to stay home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the coronavirus spreads in the United States and tech companies ask their workforces to do their jobs from home, some in the industry are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will broadly replace working in person.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll never probably be the same,\u201d Jennifer Christie, Twitter\u2019s head of human resources, told BuzzFeed News of the company\u2019s workplace practices. \u201cPeople who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way. Managers who didn\u2019t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won\u2019t go back.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Twitter \u2014 whose CEO, Jack Dorsey, said he wanted to move toward<\/a> a distributed workforce in the most recent earnings call \u2014 is one of a number of companies asking employees to work from home as the coronavirus hits the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Square, which Dorsey also runs, asked the same of its employees this week. Job board website Indeed has\u00a0mandated<\/a>\u00a0it. Amazon\u00a0asked employees<\/a>\u00a0to test VPNs, anticipating they might need to work from home as well. And some tech workers are starting to clock in from home before their companies roll out an official policy of having most or all of their employees work from home or outside a central office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI do think we won\u2019t go back.\u201d<\/p>Jack Dorsey – Twitter CEO<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe’ve gotten a lot of positive reactions to going in this direction in terms of putting our safety of our employees first,\u201d Christie said, \u201cand so some other companies might be willing to take a leap.\u201d As of Wednesday, the number of reported coronavirus cases in the US<\/a> had risen to 153 and the death toll to 11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Twitter announced its work-from-home policy, some employees remained at the office, but at their discretion. For the most part, the company now has an entirely distributed workforce. On Tuesday, Twitter held its monthly all-hands meeting entirely online \u2014 via Google Hangouts and Slack \u2014 with Dorsey dialing in from an undisclosed location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With no in-person component involved, the Q&A portion of Twitter\u2019s all-hands was livelier than usual. \u201cThe number of questions that came in, the people that were responding on Slack \u2014 it just was so much more engaged,\u201d Christie said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of introverts in the company. It\u2019s also a little bit of…not a level playing field. You have people in San Francisco, and then people dialing in from around the world who feel like they\u2019re not quite having the same experience. It was much more level setting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The push for working remotely wasn\u2019t limited to Twitter. According to the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>, major Bay Area employers, including Microsoft<\/a> and JPMorgan, were also encouraging workers to stay home. Google told most of its workers at its Dublin, Ireland, offices to stay home after a coronavirus case was reported there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ed Zitron, a tech PR veteran, told BuzzFeed News he\u2019d welcome a move to a virtual workplace. \u201cThere are no positives in the case of the coronavirus, but I\u2019m definitely seeing a reevaluation of whether meeting in person is truly necessary. You can really see people moving away from having in-persons that they know deep inside are just for the comfort of seeing someone for some reason,\u201d he said. \u201cI just wish it didn\u2019t take a global pandemic to make people rethink the necessity of in-person meetings. That\u2019s the valley for you, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One tech worker in New York, who has social anxiety, said he started working from home ahead of any company policy, looking at this virus as a chance to prove he can do his work outside of the office. \u201cI’m probably jumping the gun, but since most of my job \u2014 really pretty much all of my job \u2014 can be done remote, I’m taking the opportunity to prove that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, workers whose jobs cannot be performed remotely won\u2019t have an easy transition as the virus takes hold in the US. Twitter, for instance, has facilities and cafeteria workers whose jobs require them to be in the office. The company will continue to pay these people even if they have to work on a reduced schedule, Christie said. \u201cWe’re not going to put people out and\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0not pay them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Originally posted at BuzzFeed News <\/a>by <\/em><\/strong>Alex<\/em><\/strong> Kantrowitz<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/alexkantrowitz\/the-coronavirus-is-forcing-techies-to-work-from-home-some<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter are encouraging workers to stay home. As the coronavirus spreads in the United States and tech companies ask their workforces to do their jobs from home, some in the industry are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,9,6,3,7,8,4],"tags":[18,21,22,20,23,16,19,11,14,13,17,12,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n\n\n\n