Nokia Oyj said that its employees can choose to work up to three days a week remotely with increased support for flexible working hours from January next year after its current work from home policy comes to an end in December.
The telecom equipment maker conducted a survey of its employees at the end of last year and a majority said they wanted to work two to three days per week remotely, up from an average of two days before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The pandemic forced organizations to change. Technology gave people the tools to innovate. In many cases, the results have been too good to go back to the old way of doing things,” Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said.
The Finnish firm, which had about 92,000 employees in 130 countries at the end of last year, in March said it plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs within two years to trim costs and invest more in research capabilities.
Nokia plans to redesign offices to allocate up to 70 percent of the space in some sites to teamwork and meetings, with less area reserved for workspaces.
Offices in Dallas, Texas, Singapore and Budapest have already been reconfigured, with further sites expected to be completed by the end of the year, as Nokia follows companies worldwide in opting for more hybrid working in the wake of the pandemic.
Automaker Renault SA and Stellantis NV, the maker of Peugeot and Citroen vehicles, has made agreements with workers to allow employees to work from home for up to three days a week.
Bumble Inc, the dating and relationship app, temporarily closed its offices this week, giving its about 700 employees a “much needed break” to recover from COVID-19 burnout.
Corporations such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co are requiring all vaccinated employees to come back to the office by the fall, whereas Apple Inc pursues a hybrid work-from-home strategy and Twitter Inc has said many employees would be able to work from home indefinitely.
With COVID-19 pandemic-induced restrictions now largely lifted across the nation, companies are taking different approaches to retain staff and boost productivity. Some expect a full return to office, while others are offering a more flexible approach.
INFRINGEMENT: The investigation comes after a complaint from Vicor Corp, with the company seeking a limited exclusion order as well as cease-and-desist orders, the ITA said The US International Trade Commission (USITC) has launched a Section 337 investigation naming Taiwanese technology companies, including Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海), Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), as respondents. The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) pledged assistance if needed. The USITC said on Friday in a statement that it had voted to institute an investigation under Section 337 of the US Tariff Act of 1930 into certain vertical power delivery systems, related components and computing devices incorporating such systems. The investigation covers 20 companies from Taiwan, China, Germany and the US, the commission said, adding that it
IN GOOD FAITH: Lai said he appreciates Micron’s commitment to Taiwan and that it would continue expanding its investment in the country, while also working with labor President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday called for US memory maker Micron Technology Inc and its workers to negotiate “sincerely” ahead of a possible strike by the company’s union in Taiwan. Last week, a Taiwanese union representing workers at Micron said it had secured authorization from its members to strike over a dispute concerning the company’s bonus scheme, escalating a labor conflict at the chipmaker’s largest manufacturing hub. Micron employs about 15,000 people in Taiwan and has said it invested more than NT$1.6 trillion (US$49.6 billion) in the country. Speaking in Taichung at the opening of a new Micron advanced assembly and testing facility,
A man charged along with Super Micro Computer Inc co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw (廖益賢) of conspiring to send cutting-edge chips to China in violation of US export controls pleaded guilty, court documents said. Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun (孫廷瑋), a former outside contractor described by US authorities as a “fixer” who allegedly aided in the sales, pleaded guilty on Thursday at a hearing in federal court in New York as part of an agreement with prosecutors, court filings showed. Prosecutors claimed the men were part of a scheme to send Nvidia Corp-powered servers to an unnamed Southeast Asian company and then divert them to
Microsoft Corp chief executive officer Satya Nadella said companies should treat powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models as potential insider threats, assume they could be compromised and create an “emergency brake” system to prevent agentic models from going rogue. Nadella said that those deploying advanced AI should not rely on assurances from model makers. “We must assume a model is compromised and contain it from the start,” Nadella wrote on Saturday in a post on X. “Think of it like an emergency brake. An authorized person should always be able to pause or shut down a model mid-task.” The statement comes as Anthropic PBC