A huge number of Google employees have been working from home. This has been the case since March. In fact, even the CEO Sundar Pichai has gone record stating that most of the employees of the tech giant will continue to work from home for the rest of the year 2020. In fact, there have been speculations that most of the employees may continue working from home till 2021.
Google had previously announced that all the employees will be offered $1000 so that they can comfortably work from home. The extra allowance has been stated to be spent on the equipment that they would need to outfit their homes to make their homes their workplaces.
Lauren Whitt, who is the wellness and resilience lead at Google has now explained the reason for the new allowance offered to its employees. It has been one of the major duties of Lauren to ensure that the employees are always in the pink of health. This includes the responsibility to ensure that the employees have access to good mental health. It is her duty to ensure that they have a great deal of wellness resources during these times of extreme uncertainty.
It would be heartening to know that Google pays a lot of importance to the mental wellbeing of its employees. That should explain why they have a 10 number strong group handling the global well-being and mental health teams and this team works with all the employees around the globe.
In fact, shifting from a huge workspace with a huge number of perks to working from home can definitely be something that can be quite a tough task. Google understands this clearly. Google has been attempting hard to make the workers adapt to their new working regime. As Lauren puts it,
Google has been making sure that the employees would not be missing out on all that they used to experience while at the office. This includes the fitness centres and the coaches, the great food at the Google cafes, and other varied kinds of perks. The team has also formed group of Googlers who are into virtual meditation and mindfulness classes. The Blue Dot Community is yet another initiative so that they would continue to experience the same at their homes what they had been experiencing at the office.
The $1000 allowance is essentially a part of this initiative. Google wants its employees to set up one of the most productive workstations at home so that they would be able to separate their personal life from their professional life just as they used to do when they were attending the physical office.
Says Lauren,
Google has also been suggesting a few good options to ensure that the employees can address the burnout. A few tips that Google has been offering would include “step away from your computer every 90 minutes, to get outdoors, even if you just need to do pushups or jumping jacks or stand up in between meetings and move around and shake it out”.
As of now, Google has extended the work from home policy for the rest of 2020. A few of the essential staffers will be or may be asked to attend to the office in June or July, but rest of the staff is likely to continue working from home.
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