Google got the work-at-home world buzzing on Thursday (March 18) with a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai detailing the tech giant’s plan to invest $7 billion in offices and data centers across the U.S., with a corresponding creation of 10,000 new full-time jobs. The news follows an announcement Pichai emailed to employees late last year stating that the company planned to experiment with a hybrid system where some employees could work at home two days a week and in the office for the other three.
“Coming together in-person to collaborate and build community is core to Google’s culture, and it will be an important part of our future,” wrote Pichai. “So we continue to make significant investments in our offices around the country, as well as our home state of California, where we will be investing over $1 billion this year.”
The Google chief explained that in addition to the California investment, the company will add roles in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., as well as expand data centers in Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Texas, among other growth initiatives.
Optimistically Cautious
Google’s $7 billion investment is actually lower than the company’s growth budgets in 2018 and 2019, which averaged $11 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal — meaning that the company is perhaps stepping cautiously back into the world of the post-pandemic office. That’s likely a smart move, considering that nearly 25 percent of respondents surveyed by employment platform Glassdoor said they would consider quitting their jobs if they were forced to return to the office before all employees are vaccinated against COVID-19, while 17 percent said they might quit anyway if they had to return to the office five days a week. The survey also found that 86 percent of respondents would prefer to continue working at home at least part of the time even after offices reopen.
While employee surveys can give a general sense of how workers are feeling about post-pandemic working situations, author and CEO adviser Dan Ciampa believes they should only be one part of the equation as bosses consider reopening physical locations. “Some HR departments treat these surveys as gospel,” he wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “However, wise CEOs recognize that such opinions often change. What people say after a year of sheltering in place may not be meaningful this fall, particularly if by then they’ve had several months of living with fewer restrictions. In the same way that political leaders should not base decisions solely on public opinion polls, leaders must look at employee surveys as one data point.”
Main Street Gets Back To Wall Street
While tech companies like Google largely have the luxury of letting employees work from home at least part of the time, the feeling in the financial sector seems to be that office-based employment is critical.
Case in point: J.P. Morgan Chase & Co is planning to bring hundreds of interns to its physical offices in New York and London this summer because of their need to shadow more senior employees to learn the business. “Most of us learn by an apprenticeship system, by seeing mistakes, going [on] trips, how to handle a client, how to handle the problem,” Jamie Dimon, the firm’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s hard to inculcate culture and character and all those things … it’s very hard to build and develop a deeper relationship on Zoom.”
Evercore Inc. Co-Chief Executive Officer Ralph Schlosstein echoed that sentiment, saying that the goal for his investment banking advisory firm is to get people back into the office as soon as possible while trying to remain sensitive to employee needs. “We at Evercore are passionate believers that ours is a business of human interaction and apprenticeship and mentorship,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. “On a case-by-case basis, we can and will be flexible. I’m hopeful that, in our industry, this allows for longer careers for both females and males who are very actively involved in their children’s upbringing, who can still be active in our business, and be home from time to time as well.”
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