The head of Google’s parent company said that more than 60% of workers at the online giant might never return to in-person work.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company could “do better” to provide employees with a flexible work environment during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s always made me wonder — when I see people commuting two hours and away from their family and friends on a Friday, you realize they can’t have plans,” Pichai told Time magazine. “So, I think we could do better.”
Pichai said as much as 62% of the search engine’s workforce might stay online after the pandemic.
Google released internal surveys that found employees were open to returning to an office environment “some days” out of the week and that the desire to work strictly from home had dropped in the past few months.
The move follows other tech giants, such as Facebook and Twitter, that have committed to moving some of their workforce to permanent online status.
“I see the future as being more flexible,” Pichai said. “We firmly believe that being in-person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new, so we don’t see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models.”
