Forbes – Forbes Real Estate Council, by Joe Brady
Months into the pandemic that has forced the ultimate work-from-home experiment, companies including Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Amazon and Salesforce, just to name a few, have all reportedly extended their work-from-home options. Salesforce, for example, is allowing employees in all its 160 office locations globally to work remotely for the rest of this year, long after it began reopening offices in phases at the end of May 2020.
Twitter and Facebook have taken a more radical approach and have announced that their employees can work remotely forever. A Twitter representative told TechCrunch, “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 past few months have proven we can make that work.”
Since the start of the pandemic, we have spoken with over 50 heads of corporate real estate across the globe as part of our Agile CRE Think Tank (ACT). As one participant summarized, work-from-home is no longer the enemy of the C-suite. Through these conversations, we have made a conservative estimate that we will see 15%-20% of participating firms will move to a more agile strategy.