Tech giants Apple, Google and Twitter are reopening offices in India, and preparing its employees to return to work at least for a few days in a week to begin with.
Apple is bringing back employees in India once a week beginning April 11, and three days in a week effective May 23. Google has opened its offices in India and employees can voluntarily choose to work from its offices.
Google employees in the US will be returning to the office beginning the week of April 4. A report in March cited John Casey, Google’s vice president of global benefits, in an email to employees, saying, “It’s been a long and challenging two years since the vast majority of our people started working from home. But the advances in prevention and treatment, the steady decline in cases that we continue to see, and the improved safety measures we have implemented across our Bay Area sites now mean we can officially begin the transition to the hybrid work week.”
The report quoting Casey said nearly 14,000 of the company’s 156,500 full-time employees around the world have transferred to a new location or moved to fully remote work.
Twitter has reopened its offices from March 15, including in India. Twitter’s tech hub in Bengaluru has grown to a few hundred employees. Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal tweeted in March: “Business travel is back effective immediately, and all global Twitter offices will open starting on March 15... Decisions about where you work, whether you feel safe travelling for business, and what events you attend, should be yours,” he said. He went on to say, “Wherever you feel most productive and creative is where you will work and that includes WFH full-time forever...Distributed working will be challenging. We’ll need to be proactive, intentional, learn, and adapt."
He noted: “Office visits, team meetings and events all bring that culture to life in such a powerful way, and I can’t wait to see it all happen.” Emails to Apple, Google and Twitter on their India office plans remained unanswered till the time for going to the press.