Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif., last month The social-media giant is allowing employees to work from home through at least the end of the year.
PHOTO: JEFF CHIU/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Four years ago, Aaron Levie moved Box Inc., the fast-growing cloud-computing company he co-founded, into a new, red-brick building with its logo on the facade. Box decked it out with all the trappings of Silicon Valley: a sleek cafeteria, common areas with orange hammocks, and a bar built from a converted Volkswagen van with kombucha and cold-brew coffee on tap.
Mr. Levie and his staff haven’t been in that office for eight weeks, yet the chief executive says work has been plenty smooth without it. His sales team is interacting with more clients, participation is higher in weekly all-hands meetings, and without travel, he devotes more time to work.
“You strip out a commute and you strip out having to get on an airplane for business meetings and you kind of remove a lot of these other things that crept into the work that you had to do,” said Mr. Levie, a longtime proponent of flexible work. Box provides online storage and file-sharing products that can be used for such situations.
Even when it is safe to return, Mr. Levie says he expects many tech companies to allow some employees to skip the commute—and have workforces that are scattered well beyond Silicon Valley.
Companies across the business spectrum are evaluating when and how their employees will return to the office. But few industries have been as closely identified with their workplace as technology.
Silicon Valley, the stretch of small cities and office parks south of San Francisco, is a metonym for the entire tech industry, and the campuses of companies like Facebook Inc.,Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. are famous for innovative office layouts, collaboration spaces, ping-pong tables, and upscale cafeterias that mean employees never need to leave to eat—or, in many cases, pay for food.
In recent years, tech giants have invested even more in their offices, among them Apple’s $5 billion spaceship-shaped headquarters, Salesforce.com Inc.’s 61-story tower in the heart of San Francisco, and, Amazon.com Inc.’s giant, tree-filled glass spheres in Seattle. By design the spaces are open so people can easily come in contact with one another—the very opposite of social distancing.
But the industry also has an overwhelmingly white-collar workforce and an ethos of adaptability, and tech companies were among the first to send employees home when the coronavirus outbreak paralyzed the U.S. in March. Two months into that new reality, some tech companies say the changes will have lasting impact on how their industry works and recruits.
Few companies have gone as far as Twitter Inc., whose CEO, Jack Dorsey, said this past week that most employees would be permitted to work from home permanently. Google and Facebook are allowing employees to work from home until at least the end of the year, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month canceled all gatherings of 50 or more people through June 2021.