After the US tech giants permitted their employees to work remotely, people are seeking opportunities to never go back to the office again.

The prevalence of the deadly disease has forced people to think if working remotely in the future can replace working on-site.

“We’ll never probably be the same,” said Jennifer Christie, Chief HR Officer at Twitter.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Christie said: “People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way.

“Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”

As coronavirus continues to spread in the United States, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he is looking forward to establishing a distributed workforce.

Dorsey proposed the same idea to the employees working in his other company, Square.

Indeed, the employment-related search engine, has also supported the same idea.

Amazon too had instructed its employees to review VPNs as they might later be directed to stay at their homes and work from there.

Some tech-savvy people have already started working from their homes without waiting for the official declaration by their respective companies.

Christie said: “We’ve gotten a lot of positive reactions to going in this direction in terms of putting our safety of our employees first, and so some other companies might be willing to take a leap.”

Though Twitter has officially allowed its workers to work remotely, some employees stayed at the office willingly.

Twitter’s monthly all-hands meeting held on Tuesday was conducted online through Slack and Google Hangouts.

CEO Dorsey attended the meeting from an undetectable location.

The recent meeting came up with amazing results. As revealed by Christie, the Q/A session this time proved to be the most interactive session ever.

She said: “The number of questions that came in, the people that were responding on Slack — it just was so much more engaged.

“We’ve got a lot of introverts in the company. It’s also a little bit of…not a level playing field.

“You have people in San Francisco, and then people dialing in from around the world who feel like they’re not quite having the same experience. It was much more level setting.”

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase are also encouraging their staff to work from home.

Speaking of a permanent virtual workplace, Ed Zitron, founder of EZPR, told BuzzFeed News: “There are no positives in the case of the coronavirus, but I’m definitely seeing a reevaluation of whether meeting in person is truly necessary.

“You can really see people moving away from having in-persons that they know deep inside are just for the comfort of seeing someone for some reason.

“I just wish it didn’t take a global pandemic to make people rethink the necessity of in-person meetings. That’s the valley for you, I guess.”

Promoting the same concept, an anti-social tech worker said: “I’m probably jumping the gun, but since most of my job — really pretty much all of my job — can be done remote, I’m taking the opportunity to prove that.”

Speaking of the people whose work can’t be performed from a far-off location, Christie said the company will be paying them no matter if they work for reduced hours.

She said: “We’re not going to put people out and not not pay them.”

 

 

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