Topline
As vaccination rates across the country continue to rise, major tech companies – which were among the first to move to remote work early in the pandemic – say they will open offices with potential limited in the coming months.
A logo can be seen on the front of Uber’s headquarters in Mission Bay, San Francisco, … [+]
Image by Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
Key facts
Uber and Microsoft announced this week that they will open their headquarters on March 29, with Uber saying that employees can come back voluntarily until the site reaches 20% capacity.
The SAP software giant told the Silicon Valley Business Magazine they plan to open offices in the “next few weeks,” while Facebook announced Friday that it will open the Menlo Park headquarters on May 10 at a 10% capacity, a spokesman said.
In a speech on the Clubhouse audio chat app, Salesforce COO and President Bret Taylor said Thursday that the company would open offices “soon,” although a spokesman told the San Francisco Chronicle, the company does not have a strong timeline.
Google announced in December that employees will return to the office in September 2021.
The announcement comes after several counties in the San Francisco Bay Area moved into California’s “orange” reopening phase, allowing non-essential offices to reopen at 25% capacity. (California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that the state will open vaccines to all adults over April 16 on April 15.)
Key background
The pandemic has already changed as major technical companies come to work after the pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects half of Facebook’s employees to be remote by 2030, although there is likely to be a pay cut in remote workers moving to cheaper areas. Both Salesforce and Microsoft say they will introduce a hybrid working model where employees come into the office a few days a week (Google is testing a program of the one type). Twitter, Square, Dropbox and Coinbase are just a few of the major companies that allow employees to work from home on a permanent basis.
Large numbers
18.3%. That is the segment of the population in the San Francisco Bay Area that has been fully vaccinated. Covid-19 case levels have also declined in the state. At the height of the winter surge in mid-January, California saw more than 40,000 daily cases. Now, the state has about 2,400 new cases every day.
Tangent
In Thursday’s Clubhouse speech, Salesforce President Bret Taylor revealed that 23% of the company’s employees in June 2020 wanted to return to the office in some way. Now, that number is at 72%, with most employees saying they want to go back a day or two a week.