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SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter became the first major tech company to allow employees who can work remotely to do so indefinitely, as the coronavirus outbreak forces unprecedented changes in work culture across the world.
Twitter will allow its employees to work from home “forever”, chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said in a company-wide email. “We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere,” the company said in a blogpost.
“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.”
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Twitter has strongly encouraged working from home since 2nd March and mandated employees to work from home starting 11th March. Employees who prefer to work remotely can now do so indefinitely, Twitter said in its statement, while those who want to return to the office will probably need to wait until at least September.
Twitter has suspended almost all employee business travel and all of its in-person events until 2021. It is also giving employees increased allowances to buy home office supplies including desks and desk chairs.
The change comes as companies across the tech industry are weighing how to manage their offices in the coming months. Google and Facebook extended their work-from-home policies into 2021. Amazon extended its work-from-home policy until at least early October.
The company, which is under pressure to combat misinformation on its platform related to the pandemic, did not disclose the exact number of employees who will be presented with the option to work from home indefinitely.
Facebook and Google have allowed most of their employees to work remotely until the end of this year. Last week, Google said it has asked employees to take a day off on May 22, to address work-from-home related burnout during the pandemic.
