Tech companies are reopening their offices, but tech work has changed forever

Two years ago last week, Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s campuses on the West Coast began to be evacuated as the coronavirus began to spread across the US, a move that was quickly echoed by the vast majority. Offices across the country. Today, many skilled knowledge workers have no interest in going back to what they were before. In their relentless search for new talent, tech firms and old-guard companies need to find more tech-savvy employees, hiring and retaining people who work on schedules and locations of their choice. Feel empowered to demand.

Even when the pandemic is over, many tech leaders believe flexibility at work will be a staple, with hiring more geographically dispersed and people taking their time off than before. They are available to collaborate with colleagues and other periods, with specified hours. Where individual work is the priority.

“Our sense of place has been permanently disrupted,” says Annie Dean, who was previously the head of remote work for Facebook in the pandemic and is now at software developer Atlassian Corp, where her title is vice president of the Anywhere team. She predicts that bosses who force employees to return to offices in a harsh manner will lose credibility with their workforce. “That’s not the way we move forward.”

Last week Alphabet’s Google outlined its return-to-work plans: Employees will return to the office a few days a week in early April. But Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai told The Wall Street Journal last month that the future of work is resilient and that he sees it as a new canvas on which to develop new ways that people can live their work lives. more complete and make their personal life more complete. ,

Apple Inc. told employees on Friday that they would begin returning to the office one day a week from April 11, and would work up to three days per week by the end of May.

And Twitter Inc., which was one of the first to announce that its employees will work from anywhere permanently, announced Thursday that it plans to begin reopening its offices from March 15. . But while making the announcement, CEO Parag Agarwal insisted that the company’s ultimate philosophy of getting back to work is the employee’s choice.

“You will work wherever you feel most productive and creative, and that includes working from home forever. office every day? He works too. Some days in the office, some days at home? Of course,” Mr Agarwal told the staff.

Perhaps one of the most enduring ways Covid has changed the workscape, as evidenced by a recent Twitter thread where several high-profile executives have worked.

“The place to be was Silicon Valley. It looks like the place to be now is the internet,” tweeted Airbnb Inc Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky.

Brian Armstrong, head of Coinbase Global Inc., said that Silicon Valley has already moved from California to the cloud. Eighty-nine percent of cryptocurrency exchanges were somewhere other than the West Coast in the most recent quarter, he tweeted, up from 30% before the pandemic.

Alyssa Henry, head of Square business at the newly renamed Block Inc., tweeted that 40% of the managers on her team have no direct reports of being in the same location. “Distributed and asynchronous work is now and the future,” she said.

The tech industry isn’t the only venture into the far-right recruiting efforts these days. General Motors Co. said it plans to hire 8,000 high-tech employees this year, many of them located far from its Detroit headquarters “some in offices like Austin, Texas and some working from home.”

“It’s not just confining us to our backyards,” says Kyle Lagunas, GM’s head of talent. He took the auto maker’s job last year, helping oversee recruitment, in part because it helped him to Massachusetts. “I’m never going to Detroit,” he said.

new ways of working

Where people work directly affects the way people work. Once teams disintegrated in the Covid era and started taking their roles from across the country, tech companies looked for ways to balance collaboration time with colleagues with focused time for individual work.

Enter ‘asynchronous’ work, where employees get to schedule their hours according to the schedule best suited to their lives. Slack Technologies Inc. has ‘key hours’ where team members must be available to jump on calls or hang out with their teams. Slack parent Salesforce Inc. Encourages employees to set their Slack status to ‘Focus Time’ when they are handling individual work or ‘Connecting’ to indicate their availability to collaborate.

Salesforce recently tried its first ‘async week’, where 20,000 of its nearly 70,000 employees canceled regular meetings to allow more time for solo work, a spokesperson said. Of the participants in the experiment, 72% said it made them more productive and 70% reported that it made them less stressed. Two more async weeks are planned for this year.

Twitter is taking a similar approach, where teams come up with normal working hours that work for them to collaborate. It recently experimented with a companywide ‘focus’ week, where most meetings were canceled and people could hold onto things like backlog assignments.

Megan Gleeson, Twitter’s vice president of career experience, said, “We had a very meeting-heavy culture. We started ticking up the number of meetings during the pandemic so that people could find connections.”

Now Twitter encourages workers to think about ‘meeting hygiene’, which can include setting a strict agenda for efficiency, recording meetings so those who can’t attend can listen later, and consider whether the meeting should actually take place or not. All, said Ms. Gleason.

Ms. Dean, former head of remote work at Facebook, said companies still have a lot to do to keep the asynchronous model running smoothly. Biggest Challenge to Solve: “Doing this huge collaboration,” she said.

Workers can’t string together consecutive hours to stay focused, so they sometimes work well beyond the traditional 9-to-5 schedule, with ping and ding signaling requests coming in from across the Internet. Going forward, Ms. Dean predicts that knowledgeable employers will help people reduce their online time.

“There wouldn’t be an expectation that you need to be online for 10 hours a day, available to other people,” she said.

Instead, teams will do more front-end planning for projects and then dispatch team members with tasks and deadlines. For some, hybrid models may work where people arrive on set days of the week, while other teams may need to work from the office for five days, two consecutive weeks, to complete a plan for a project. Is; They could then work from home for several weeks as they delivered that project, with online check-ins in the meantime.

new ways to collect

Tech companies spent years selling their lavish office complexes filled with perks like on-site massages, free meals and exercise classes as major reasons to work for them. Although most employees will only go back part-time, these positions will serve an important purpose, many companies say.

The tech sector accounted for 37% of the total square footage of the top 100 office leases signed last year, up from 32% in 2019, according to a new report by CBRE, a commercial real estate company that uses office buildings. Owns and leases. ,

Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. last year signed a lease on Austin’s Sixth Street, adding an additional 589,000 square feet to its existing office space in the city. According to Kathryn Shapley, the head of the company’s Austin office, Meta currently has 2,000 employees living in Austin and another 500 job openings. The company also expanded its office space during the pandemic in New York City, Boston, Chicago and Bellevue, Wash., which have deep pools of tech talent.

But today’s tech offices look different. Dropbox no longer calls its Spaces ‘Office’. Instead, it calls them ‘studios’; There are fewer desks and more meeting rooms and lounges for less formal team gatherings.

Google is running a series of pilot programs in the Bay Area, New York City, Dublin, London and Singapore to reconfigure some office layouts to boost productivity and engagement. The company said it plans to see how those experiments go before scaling up.

More companies are holding off-site meetings in hotels, coffee shops or in executives’ backyards rather than pulling them into traditional offices. Salesforce has said that its existing offices will be used for more collaboration and less personal work, but it is going a step further with an off-site project that combines work and wellness. Salesforce is bringing 10,000 employees this year to an employee retreat outside Santa Cruz, Calif., where workers will meet to train and bond with their colleagues in addition to hiking, yoga and cooking classes.

The pandemic has broken the boundaries between employees’ personal and professional lives, and many officials say workers’ mental health and well-being concerns will continue into their workdays.

Conversations that may have once been with friends outside the office now feel natural among coworkers who have become accustomed to supporting their peers during the pandemic, said Francine Katsoudas, chief people, at networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. Policy and Objectives Officer said. He adds that it would continue to be more acceptable for employees to talk about their mental health and the state of their personal lives at work, and to expect support from their bosses when they do.

“We are now moving into a world where leaders need to be individually aware of what each employee needs and how they work best,” Ms Katsoudas said. with work.”