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Twitter Announces That Employees Can Work From Home 'Forever' If They Want

Updated September 6, 2021

In a bid to comply with governmental stay-at-home orders and to ensure the safety of their employees, many companies throughout the world have found themselves quickly instituting ways for their staff to work from home.

In cases where both the work itself and any relevant meetings can be done virtually, it only made sense to put the technology that has fulfilled this purpose for years to work and bring people in many distinct locations together.

But as states unveil plans to re-open businesses, a question has remained in the minds of business owners who have managed to make this work: Do we actually need people to come into the office?

That answer likely varies from firm to firm, but Twitter's directors have recently come up with what sounds like a pretty decisive answer.

While many tech companies started having employees work from home at around the same time in March, they seem to vary on when workers can stop.

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As Forbes reported, Facebook expects to re-open its offices by July 6, but assured employees that most of them would be able to work from home until the end of 2020.

Although Google is less specific about when its offices may open again — they have cited "June or July" as a potential start time — they are also extending their workers' ability to work from home to the end of the year.

As far as Twitter is concerned, however, there doesn't necessarily need to be a day that sees its workforce fully return to the office.

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As BBC reported the social media firm as saying, "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."

It's unclear how many of their over 4,000 employees this policy applies to, but we do know that Twitter isn't fixing to permanently close their physical doors.

Although the San Francisco-based company does plan to re-open its offices eventually, that isn't likely to happen before September.

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But when it happens, those who would prefer to return to these offices will apparently find them as "their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions."

Sree Sreenivasan, a digital innovation professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism, called this "era-defining news."

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As he told the BBC, "Some people may not take this seriously as it's Twitter, but we can learn a lot from Silicon Valley about workplace flexibility. There has been a mentality that working from home was stealing from the boss and facetime in the office was more important."

However, the reality of widespread working from home over the past couple of months has shown this mentality isn't accurate.

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As Sreenivasan said, "People are proving they can be far more productive and get tasks done working from home. A lot of people tell me they are working harder at home and are exhausted."

While that exhaustion doesn't necessarily sound encouraging, it does show that working from home isn't the bane to productivity that some might see it as.

h/t: BBC

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