desymbol: Twitter Allows Employees To Work From Home Forever

Some Twitter employees may never return to their office. Company CEO Jack Dorsey emailed his staff on Tuesday to tell them that they’d be allowed to work from home even after the pandemic lockdown passes. Permanently. Although some jobs that require physical presence, for example, maintaining servers, will still require people to come in.

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We’ll continue to be, and we’ll continue to put the safety of our people and communities first.”

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Twitter encouraged its employees to start working from home at the beginning of March, just as the coronavirus started to spread across the US. Other big tech companies did the same, including Microsoft and Google.

That month, Twitter human resources head Jennifer Christie said the company would “never probably be the same” in the structure of its work. “People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way,” Christie said. “Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”

Image credits: JD Lasica

“We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere,” a Twitter spokesperson told Tech Crunch.

The past few months have proven they can make that work. “So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen. If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return.”