The company has said it plans to spend $9.5 billion on offices and data centers in 2022 alone, and on Tuesday it officially opened its long-awaited Bay View campus-a massive 1.1 million-square-foot, four-building complex in Mountain View not far from the Googleplex.Ĭicconi, who’s worked in human resources her entire career, says Google seemed like it was “now ready for an HR practitioner” when she joined. Google must invest in both the cutting-edge technology that enables its employees and customers to seamlessly work from anywhere, as well as old-school bricks and mortar. It’s a move that requires a massive shift in both thinking and process for a company of 165,000 employees, 50,000 of whom joined during the pandemic and have rarely, if ever, been to one of its offices before. Complicating things further, there’s the option to apply to opt out and become permanently remote, a choice that in some cases triggers a salary cut. Which days depends on product area-for example, those working on search come in Tuesday through Thursday. Far fewer- most famously Goldman Sachs-have demanded a five-day-a-week return, betting on the prestige of their brands to minimize defections to less rigid competitors.Īlphabet, Google’s parent company, has picked the third option: a hybrid approach in which employees work from the office three days a week and two from home. Some companies, including Twitter and Airbnb, have responded to this era of worker ascendence by allowing employees to log on from anywhere. “The employee is king right now,” explains Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford.
INSIDE THE OFFICE ISSUES FREE
Not even Google’s famous amenities, which came to define the booming rise of Silicon Valley-the free food, the massages, the laundry service-can convince white-collar workers to give up the flexibility that they’ve long craved and are now demanding. In a red-hot labor market, the most in-demand perk of office life is not having to go to the office at all. The only thing certain is that there’s no going back to the beforetimes when we compliantly plodded into the office five days a week to toil away at our cubicles. The problem? There is no formula that can be written, no algorithm that can be tweaked, for the logistically challenging and emotionally fraught act of returning to the office tens of thousands of employees who have spent the last two-plus years working from home. Even the return date itself came with a string of misfires-new COVID variants and rising case numbers foiled three previous attempts. And while Google says it expects 20% of its employees to eventually take advantage of its policy to work remotely full-time, so far a mere 5% have. In a few locations, some schlepped in for the first time in two years only to find themselves without a desk. On the second official day back, roadwork in Mountain View caused an hour-long backup for workers exiting the main campus.
For a company that’s supposed to be able to predict everything from what you want to search for to how long it will take to get to the airport, Google has gotten a lot wrong lately.Īfter two years of remote work, the search giant finally called its employees back to the office starting the week of April 4.
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