SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Some of San Francisco Bay’s largest technology companies, including Twitter Inc. and Google, plan to keep their offices largely closed for months, despite the government’s permission on Tuesday to be open with limited capacity.
Given the decline in coronavirus infections, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties have eased guidelines that have kept most office buildings closed for the past year, with the exception of crucial security and assistance personnel.
As of Wednesday, companies are allowed to open their offices to a quarter of their capacity.
“San Francisco will come to life,” Mayor London Breed told reporters. “When we start reopening, more and more people will want to go back to work and want to be around other people.”
But Silicon Valley companies that pledged last year to allow workers to stay home until this summer or have declared indefinitely that they have met their deadlines.
They cited their own analyzes of public health data, other safety considerations and workers’ preferences. The adoption of vaccines, which in California are accessible only to the most vulnerable populations, is also a factor, but a smaller one.
Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. and file storage service Dropbox Inc. said their mandatory home policy work will remain in effect until June, while Box Inc. said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
Pinterest Inc. does not expect a significant reopening until at least August, Google Alphabet Inc. until September and DocuSign Inc. not before October.
Twitter, Adobe Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc., Twilio Inc., Yelp Inc. and Zoom Video Communications Inc. will also remain closed, despite what Breed and other local government officials have described as an “orange-level” move. at the “red level” of the California blockade restrictions.
Breed spokesman Jeff Cretan said San Francisco officials expect smaller and medium-sized companies to be the first to return.
“RENTAL BENEFITS”
Among the few companies proposing to take advantage of the relaxation were SAP SE, which said it was firmly considering the partial reopening of Bay Area offices in a few weeks, and Slack Technologies, which weighs in once to invite some workers back .
San Francisco Fast e-commerce software startup will open its doors – and windows for security – to up to 25 percent of its 56 employees in the Bay Area on Wednesday, spokesman Jason Alderman said. He said the company expects to start getting job applications from people forced to work remotely by their current employers.
“Companies like Fast that allow people to come into the office, if they want, will be an advantage in hiring,” he said.
A late-year survey of 9,000 knowledge workers commissioned by workplace chat software company Slack found that 20% want to work remotely, 17% in the office and 63% a mix of the two. .
Facebook Inc., whose offices remain closed globally until July 2, said this month it is opening 10 percent of Seattle office locations to help workers struggling at home. He had no similar news about his San Francisco offices.
Microsoft Corp., which announced plans on Monday to partially reopen its headquarters in Redmond, Washington next week, did not immediately comment on the San Francisco locations.
IBM declined to discuss Bay Area plans. But several executives at its New York headquarters began working from their offices behind closed doors.
Reporting by Paresh Dave; Additional reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee; Edited by Muralikumar Anantharaman