Twitter announces employees can work from home permanently

In an email sent to employees on May 12, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey said they could work from home permanently, even after the Coronavirus lockdown passes.

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed news, adding that safety of people and communities comes first.

Twitter had encouraged its staff to telework since early March and mandated employees to work from home since mid-March.

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

While some employees can work from home indefinitely, others working in posts that require physical presence, such as maintaining servers, will still be requested to return, when necessary. Those wishing to return to 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. It will be careful, intentional, office by office and gradual, Twitter’s post reads.

The tech giant also said that employee business travel has been suspended until September and that no in-person company events will be held for the rest of 2020.