After micro-blogging platform Twitter announced that it will let employees work from home permanently, Canadian e-commerce website Shopify and social media platform Facebook have also joined the bandwagon. “As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over,” Tobi Lutke, Shopify, CEO, announced in a tweet. As companies were forced to ask their employees to work remotely amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, several companies have now recalibrated their strategies. They have decided that work can actually be accomplished without calling their employees to office and hence have announced permanent work from home option.
Tech giant Facebook has also announced that a major chunk of its employees can now permanently work from home. In a livestream on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that about half of the company’s strength can work from entirely for the coming 5-10 years. “The reality is that I don’t think it’s going to be that we wake up one day on January first and nobody has any more concerns about this,” he said about coronavirus situation.
While more and more companies are picking on the permanent remote work trend, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the other hand has expressed reservations about it and said that permanent work from home may impact an employee’s mental health. Explaining the allure of a physical meeting, he said: “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he told the New York Times in an interview recently. Microsoft was one of the first companies to let its employees work from home in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.