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.
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could
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