The COVID-19 pandemic painted a totally new picture both socially and professionally, where telecommuting and social distancing they became two pillars that were key for the world to continue working, and to prevent said pandemic from becoming a real chaos.
Many of our readers already know the story and its consequences. Adaptation to teleworking technology consumption skyrocketed in a broad sense, and also the contracting of assistance, management, protection and remote help services. It was a huge change from the traditional model, and it showed that, in the end, offices and face-to-face work were not as essential as we thought.
The fact is that, once the pandemic is over, it’s time to return to normality, and Google is very clear about it, teleworking should not be considered as the general rule, but as the exception. This is very important because of all that it also implies in terms of hybrid work, which combines remote work days with face-to-face work. The company will strictly monitor compliance with office attendance days by its workers, most of whom must attend a minimum of three days a week.
But this is not all, those who have been lucky enough to be able to keep teleworking, and who live near the Google offices, have received a notice indicating that “they should consider switching to a hybrid modelas this will allow them to better connect with the Google community.” It is estimated that, right now, 20% of the Mountain View giant’s workforce teleworks.
In case there was any doubt that Google wants to return to the face-to-face model, we have another notice where the company says, literally, that those who have approved the teleworking concession they may end up losing that privilege if the company determines that there have been material changes in business needs, function, equipment, structure or location.
We might think that all this is related to a question of productivity, but it has been shown that employees who telework can be more productive than those who work in person, so the key to everything here seems to lie more in an attempt by Google’s make profitable the large number of offices that it currently has.
