Several of San Francisco Bay Area’s largest technology companies including Twitter Inc and Google plan to keep their offices largely closed for months more, despite the government on Tuesday allowing them to be opened in a limited capacity.
Taking into account declining COVID-19 infections, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties eased guidelines that had kept most office buildings closed for the past year except to crucial security and support staff.
Starting yesterday, firms were allowed to open up their offices for up to one-quarter of their capacity.
“San Francisco is going to come alive,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told reporters.
“When we start to reopen, more and more people are going to want to return to work and want to be around other folks,” she said.
However, Silicon Valley companies that committed last year to allowing workers to stay home until this summer or indefinitely said that they stood by their timelines.
They cited their own analyses of public health data, other safety considerations and workers’ preferences.
Adoption of COVID-19 vaccines, which in California are accessible to only the most vulnerable populations, is also a factor, but a smaller one.
Networking gear maker Cisco Systems Inc and file-storage service Dropbox Inc said that their mandatory work-from-home policies would remain effective until June, while Box Inc said its reopening is still scheduled for September.
Pinterest Inc is not eyeing a significant reopening until at least August, Alphabet Inc’s Google until September and DocuSign Inc not before October.
Twitter, Adobe Inc, PayPal Holdings Inc, Twilio Inc, Yelp Inc and Zoom Video Communications Inc also plan to stay closed, despite what Breed and other local government officials described as a move to the “orange tier” from the “red tier” of California lockdown restrictions.
Breed’s spokesman Jeff Cretan said that San Francisco officials expect smaller and mid-sized companies to be the first to return to their offices.
Among the few companies aiming to take advantage of the easing is SAP SE, which said that it is strongly considering partially reopening its Bay Area offices within weeks, and Slack Technologies, which is weighing a date to invite back some workers.
San Francisco e-commerce software start-up Fast was yesterday to open its doors — and windows for safety — to up to one-quarter of its 56 Bay Area employees, company spokesman Jason Alderman said.
He said that Fast expects to start receiving job applications from people forced to work remotely by their current employers.
“Companies like Fast that are allowing people to come into the office if they want to is going to be a hiring advantage,” he said.
A survey late last year of 9,000 knowledge workers commissioned by workplace chat software company Slack found that 20 percent of people want to work remotely, 17 percent in the office and 63 percent a mix of the two.
Facebook Inc, whose offices otherwise remain closed globally until July 2, said this month that it is opening 10 percent of seats in Seattle area offices to help workers struggling at home.
It did not share similar news about its San Francisco offices.
Microsoft Corp, which on Monday announced plans to partially reopen its Redmond, Washington, headquarters next week, did not immediately comment on its San Francisco locations.
IBM Corp declined to discuss Bay Area plans, but several senior executives at its New York headquarters have begun working from their offices with doors closed.
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