Google postpones the return date to January 10th

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Google employees will not be required to return to the office in January, the company said this week, citing concerns over the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

In August, the tech giant announced that it would require employees to return to their offices no earlier than January 10, based on local conditions. In other words, it was at that moment that the company’s remote voluntary work period was due to end.

“Beyond January 10, we will allow countries and localities to make decisions about when to end voluntary work from home based on local conditions, which vary greatly between our offices,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the time. . “To make sure everyone has plenty of time to plan, you’ll have 30 days’ notice before you go back to the office.”

But the arrival of the Omicron variant in the US is worrying enough that the tech leader is once again extending his work-from-home stint.

The company will wait until the new year to determine when its hybrid phase of work will end based on local conditions, which are constantly changing, a spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch on Friday.

According to the spokesperson, employees currently have the option to work from the office if they wish in most locations. To date, Google has reopened approximately 90% of its US offices.

Return dates for small and large companies have been a moving target throughout the pandemic, given the unpredictable course it has taken and the arrival of new, more contagious strains in the United States.

In the summer and fall, a number of employers who had predicted their return-to-office dates for September pushed them back to 2022 at most.

In October, banking company Capital One, based in McLean, Virginia, said it no longer expected workers to return to the office by November 2, the expected return date for employees to the physical workplace. The bank has not yet set a fixed date by which employees must be at their physical desks.

Remote working experts say they expect other companies to follow Google’s lead and look for more distant calendar dates for their official transitions to hybrid work models.

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