Twitter announces employees will be allowed to work from home ‘forever’

Twitter will allow its employees to work from home “forever”, chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said in a company-wide email Tuesday.

A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed the decision to the Guardian, saying the company was “one of the first companies to go to a work-from-home model” due to Covid-19, but does not anticipate being one of the first to return to its offices.

“We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere,” the company said in a blogpost.

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“The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.”

Twitter has “strongly encouraged” working from home since 2 March and mandated employees to work from home starting 11 March. Employees who prefer to work remotely can now do so indefinitely, Twitter said in its statement. Those who want to return to the office will probably need to wait until at least September.

“When we do decide to open offices, it also won’t be a snap back to the way it was before,” the company said. “It will be careful, intentional, office by office and gradual.”

Twitter has suspended almost all employee business travel and all of its in-person events until 2021. It is also giving employees increased allowances to buy home office supplies including desks and desk chairs.

The change comes as companies across the tech industry are weighing how to manage their offices in the coming months. Google and Facebook extended their work-from-home policies into 2021. Amazon extended its work-from-home policy until at least early October.

Twitter’s headquarters is based in San Francisco where, in April, Mayor London Breed extended the city’s shelter-in-place orders through the end of May. Meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom has taken steps toward slowly reopening the state, allowing some retailers to start curbside pickup services. Los Angeles, where half of the state’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred, announced on Tuesday it would probably extend its shelter-in-place order another three months.

There have been nearly 70,000 cases of coronavirus in California since 1 March, and 2,847 deaths. Of those nearly 70,000 cases, 1,974 occurred in San Francisco, where Twitter is based.