Well, amid the coronavirus outbreak, most of the companies have asked their employees to work from home. Some companies have even said that they will allow their staff to work from home even after the lockdown is lifted.
So is the work from home model the new normal? Well, looks like it. Now, Facebook announced that it will let most of its workforce stay home and work through the end of this year while it plans to reopen offices globally not before July.
Facebook will open most of its office from July 6, according to a CNBC report, saying the social networking giant is in the process of determining which employees will be asked to return to the office.
Facebook currently employs 48,268 people, an increase of 28 per cent (year-over-year).
Facebook employees have been working from home since March. According to the company, it would continue to pay hourly employees who may not be able to work because of reduced staffing, office closures, or if they're sick.
According to the report, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may announce the company's office reopening plan in an official statement soon.
Facebook has already cancelled all physical conferences and events it had planned with 50 or more people through June 2021. It includes the Oculus Connect 7 virtual reality conference in San Jose.
According to Zuckerberg, some of these will be organized as virtual events instead.
"We will share more details on that soon. Similarly, we're extending our policy of no business travel through at least June of this year as well," Zuckerberg said in a statement recently.
The company in an earnings call on April 30 admitted its business has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and, like all companies, it is facing a period of unprecedented uncertainty in its business outlook.
"We expect our business performance will be impacted by issues beyond our control, including the duration and efficacy of shelter-in-place orders, the effectiveness of economic stimuli around the world, and the fluctuations of currencies relative to the US dollar," said Facebook.
Likewise, earlier, TCS's Chief Operating Officer N Ganapathy Subramaniam said the company is expecting to have only 25 per cent of its staff work from offices by 2025, though it was not clear when the company decided on the target.
"We are seeing that our team is able to handle the transaction volumes. At the same time, we are seeing that the productivity, the velocity, the throughput of work has significantly increased. I do not believe that the gains will be lost. There will be a lot more to gain in this new model," he said.
"We don't believe that we need to have more than 25 per cent of our workforce at our facilities in order to make all the 100 per cent productive. That is one great realisation. We don't believe that every employee needs to be present all the time in our offices," Subramaniam added.
TCS has ensured that 90 per cent of its 3.55 lakh people working in India have been able to work from home in a secure manner.
