Google to reopen some offices in July

Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi, Alexis Christoforous, and Dan Howley discuss Google CEO Sundar Pichai's announcement that a limited number of Google employees will be returning to work in early July.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: While Twitter and Facebook both told their employees that they could work from home indefinitely, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai is not following suit. He announced that the company will be reopening its offices in early July for a small number of employees and will let more people back in September.

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley is here. Dan, somewhat of an outlier here.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is really just kind of a way for Google to allow some employees back into the office. It's going to be very limited. It's going to be happening in July, and it's only employees that need to be there. You could still have the option to work from home, of course, according to Google, but it's something where they'll only have to be in the office about once a week, and then they would have to work from home again.

And it's really just to kind of get those who need to be there to be there and those that don't need to be there, to allow them to continue to work remotely. And then going forward, they don't expect to get people back into the office at 100% for some time, perhaps into next year, but they are expected to have around 30% employees later in the year-- 30% capacity for their buildings. And they also are saying that they are willing to work with employees to allow them to work more remotely, and that's something that we've seen across the tech space. You know, Twitter saying people can work from home virtually forever. Facebook saying that eventually 50% of their workforce will be remote.

So it really shows that these tech companies have taken this kind of situation with the coronavirus and the need to be remote and said, well, if we can do this, we can allow employees to be remote as well. And that should allow them to recruit from a broader amount of the population outside of those just on the coasts or in certain hot spots in the country for tech incubators. I think, really, it speaks to the fact that employees around the Bay Area will have a chance to find housing that may be a lot more affordable than just that that's there.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, that could definitely be a byproduct. But what about those Google employees who want to work from home, you know, indefinitely? Is the company going to allow them to do that? I'd imagine this is still sort of in the process, and perhaps Sundar Pichai doesn't know what he's going to do yet. But do you know if people are asking to be able to work from home indefinitely?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, there's definitely going to be some folks who are going to want to work from home, and they're going to look at that and see how much they can allow. They're also giving $1,000 stipend for employees who are working from home currently to purchase office equipment that they may need. Again, this is something that obviously for everybody just happened virtually, you know, overnight where we had to start working from home, and so a lot of people didn't have the necessary setups they had-- they relied on the office.

There have been some, you know, jokes about whether or not the workers can use their corporate cards to get things like haircuts or the different various benefits that are available to them at their offices from home, but I don't think that that's something that Google is looking into.

BRIAN SOZZI: Dan, doesn't-- won't Google have to completely overhaul how its offices are laid out? Here's a company that for years has pioneered giving away free food, other perks, and playing foosball in their offices, maybe even billiards. I'm not sure. But that whole community aspect has been central to creating the products that they have created.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, and it's interesting because, you know, they purposely made it more appealing to be in the office than home to ensure that workers were there all the time. And, you know, you look at it and say, wow, we have a cafeteria that serves, you know, 24 hours a day or gives us lunch, dinner, whatever. We have fitness equipment here. We have, you know, on-site barbers, dental work, dry cleaning, anything you can imagine, but it was all just to keep people in the office. It wasn't out of the kindness of anyone's heart, really.

And so you're starting to see that, well, maybe we don't need to offer all that. Maybe the best perk is to allow workers simply to work remotely and let them do things on their own time in their own home.

So it'll be interesting to see how a company like Google responds to this. Whether or not those perks start to get phased out, whether or not they keep them, whether or not they extend them to folks who are working remotely, that's going to be a really interesting kind of aspect of all of these changes for the tech space. And then naturally that will trickle down to the rest of the economy as well and for the rest of the companies across the economy as well, as we've seen through the years.

BRIAN SOZZI: Well, Dan, if Google is selling any of their gym equipment, I am a buyer. I can't find this stuff anywhere, man. Free weights, it's sold out all over the place.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, it's something that we've been running into too over here. So I think if they're going to give it away, I'm going to get in there as well.

BRIAN SOZZI: All right, Dan Howley, thanks so much.