Tech companies have traditionally been at the forefront of revolutionizing office space. Apple Park is designed to be seamless with nature. It's open, transparent. It brings the outside in. Open floor plans have become the norm in many industries after tech companies touted the advantage of this arrangement for collaboration and innovation. And perks like in-offices, childcare centers, and communal cafeterias have also gained traction, as companies compete to attract top talent. But coronavirus may make this type of work environment a thing of the past, at least for the near future, as companies try to balance communal work with safety. In an investigation recently published bySouth Korea's Centers for Disease Control, out of the 216 people who worked on the floor of a call center, 94 people tested positive for the virus. And employees are understandably concerned. A recent survey of over 2,000full-time employees showed that over half believe their work site will need to be restructured to create more personal space.
While 49 percent believe that open offices and workspaces are no longer conducive to their health and wellness. It's never a good idea to force your employees under fear of losing their jobs to come to work. So employers will have to give employees some kind of flexibility. Tech companies, like everyone else, will need to adapt before they can bring their workforce back into the office. When it comes to reopening offices, it seems that everyone from Google, to Twitter to Facebook is taking a measured approach. We've made the decision that we're going to be on the slow end of having people come back to work. We've already started opening up some of the offices for certain roles that really can only be done there. But, we'll open up a little more slowly over time than might otherwise be possible, just in order to make sure that the folks who really need to be able to stay open, kind of have right of way on that. Facebook is asking employees who can do their jobs remotely to do so through the end of the year and canceling all company gatherings of over 50 people through June 2021. I think we're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work, at our scale, for sure. And the plan that we have initially involves a couple of big steps. The first is aggressively opening up remote hiring. And we are going to couple that with a more measured approach to opening permanent remote work for existing employees. Zuckerberg predicts that 50 percent of the company's employees could be working remotely within the next five to 10 years. An internal company survey also found that of those interested in full-time remote work, 75 percent expressed some interest in moving to a different city. But Zuckerberg warned that if employees wanted to move to a different location, they may face pay cuts that would reflect the lower costs of living in those areas. Google told its employees that it will slowly reopen its offices starting July 6th, beginning with 10percent building occupancy and eventually building up to 30percent occupancy by September.
Though Google didn't offer specifics, Pichai said in an email to employees that offices would have rigorous health and safety measures in place to ensure social distancing and sanitization procedures are followed. For most employees, going back into the office will remain voluntary until the end of the year. In the meantime, Google is covering up to $1,000 for employees' home equipment and office furniture. But the company has warned employees that it will not pay for perks like lunch for those working from home. Although Amazon's warehouse employees have worked throughout the pandemic to keep deliveries coming for customers stuck in lockdown, Amazon's corporate workers have been working from home since early March. The company has said that any of its corporate workers can continue to work from home until October 2nd. For employees that wish to return to the office, Amazon said it would put in place safety measures including physical distancing, deep cleaning, temperature checks and the availability of face coverings and hand sanitizer. Apple reportedly started to bring some workers back to its 2.8 million-square-foot campus in May, including some hardware and software engineers. Some employees are working from the Apple campus only a few days a week as the building gradually reopens.
When workers arrive, they will have the option of taking a Covid-19 test, but temperature checks are required. Apple has also closed many breakrooms and kitchens, is limiting the number of people in elevators and asking employees to wear masks. The company has also been opening some of its retail stores across the country with requirements for customers to pass temperature checks and wear masks before they enter. In the most drastic case, Twitter toldits employees that they can work from home forever. The company is also offering to pay for home office expenses. Though Twitter was embracing remotes work even prior to the COVID outbreak. We are a global service that requires global perspective. For us to continue to thrive and be valuable to people around the world, we need people from around the world to work with us. Our concentration in San Francisco is not serving us any longer, and we will strive to be a far more distributed workforce, which we will use to improve our execution. The trend of people leaving the pricey tech hubs of New York and San Francisco was already in motion even before the coronavirus outbreak. And with remote work becoming mainstream, it will likely accelerate. The sort of workplace is becoming more highly skilled. And that means that your typical workeris turning more into a knowledge worker. And where and when they do theirwork is less of a concern than it ever has been.
Massachusetts and New Jersey, are suspending these nexus rules. But it's not known how long the suspension will last. Plus, with the drain on social resources, states may be more motivated than ever to tax businesses. I think that the states if you collectively look at it, have said that the COVID- 19 crisis is going to put them in a $500 billion deficit. They've got to find some way to recoup that. And this might be one way that they do it. And then there are taxes the employee has to pay, which also vary widely from state to state. From an employee side, you're going to have withheld that, that withholding tax can double up and maybe triple up. And depending upon the state rules, you might not be able to get that money back at the end of the year. Remote work is nothing new, but the U.S. has never experienced dealing with remote workers at such scale. Kirkendall thinks that now is a good time for the federal government to step in and establish a unilateral set of nexus rules, at least for the duration of the crisis. If we could get that out of the federal government, it would do a lot to alleviate the burden on businesses, and I think ultimately it would do a lot to alleviate the uncertainties that we have. And then there's the question of how companies' investments, like new software for employees,will be taxed. You could get credits and incentives for the investments. It's another item that could potentially give you nexus in a state. And from a sales tax perspective, you have the question of what's the taxability and what state gets the tax?
All of these employees working from home begs the question, what will happen to tech-companies' massive campuses? Over the past few years, they'vemade headlines with increasingly showy real estate acquisitions. Though there haven't been plans tocompletely close down offices, there are clues that expansion may slow. In late May, Facebook said it's reducingthe office space of its 50-plus acre developmental proposal in Menlo Parkfrom 1.75 million square feet to 1.25 million square feet. This will translate to about 2,550 fewer employees in the building. There's a big challenge right now, which is that a lot of opportunities are only available in cities in these metropolitan areas, which means that people kind of need to choose between the lifestyle that they want and sometimes would need to move to a cityand leave that in order to have good economic opportunities. But it's not clear why that should have to be the case.
Still, Zuckerberg acknowledges that recreating tech culture remotely will be difficult. In general, I think one of the big challenges with remote work that we're all going have to work through is the feeling of a kind of building social bonds,building culture and creativity together. When asked whether or not Google will continue with plans to build out its new campus in Mountain View, CEO Sundar Pichai told Wired that he expects that the company's existing footprint will notbe an issue and that there is a lot of growth planned ahead. Apple, which unveiled its meticulously-designed "spaceship" campus just three years ago, has many open floorplan work areas, which the company may need to redesign before bringing back its entire workforce. When these tech campuses do open backup, employees will likely find them looking very different from the way they remember. Commercial real estate firm, Cushman and Wakefield, has shifted its business model to guide clients through this unprecedented time. The firm says it has helped10,000 businesses and almost one million people in China transition back to the office. Based on that experience and data from the World Health Organization, Cushman and Wakefield constructed a mockup of, what it calls, the "Six Feet Office," in Amsterdam to demonstrate what a safe office space may look like. The six-foot rule in termsof social distancing is really all we have at the moment for protection. So with that in mind and understandingthat people won't have time to reconstruct their office, they are notgoing to have that ability. So most of what we are recommending inour playbook is, you're able to do at zero cost.
Some practices company recommends include installing Plexiglas partitions between workspaces and puttinga piece of paper over desks that can be discarded every day,as well as only walking in one direction in hallways and not using your hands to touch elevator buttons. Organizations are in a cash preservation mode,so the want to sort of deliver a lot of capital into reimagining the workplace is not something that they're doing. They want to try to figure out how do we make do with what we have? De-densify and make sure that people are following whatever the de-densification standards thatwe're putting in place. Cushman and Wakefield suggested companies institute staggered start times and limit the number of people in elevators and conference rooms. The company also believes some people will continue to work from home, but not the majority and not always. Tech companies are going to continue to grow and tech companies are going to continue to want the collaborative effort of their employees done, by and large, in person, even as efficient as we've become from home. To build a collaborative environment, to build a brand, to build loyalty, to build trust and to create innovative breakthroughs, that's going to be done with a collective group. And that's going to be done inthe office for the most part. And then there are high-tech solutions. Brooklyn-based StrongArm Tech created a wearable device initially intended to help warehouse workers avoid injuries. But the company has now reconfigured the gadget to keep workers safe amid COVID. The Fuse is able to encourage social distancing using its sensors that communicate with each other. As two users approach each other,we have haptic feedback that's delivered as they start to encroach on a thatsix-foot parameter that was indicated by the CDC as theproper social distancing guidelines. This system is also capable of contact tracing.
With contract tracing, we're able to discreetly understand every single person that that individual of question had come in contact with. And we do that because we were built in a time-series database. So we're able to get forensic and understand down to the millisecond all of the interactions of that individual. And that's helping us build better protocols moving forward and better reopening strategies for clients as weget more data into that system. Estimote is another company advertising the use of its wearable beacons as a safeguard against the spread of coronavirus. Like StrongArm's tech, Estimote's beacons also vibrate if employees get too close to one another and keep track of interactions. The company has previously worked with the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Nike to help them track the movement of their products and people.
Density also makes a device that counts how many people pass through a hallway or congregate ina conference room. A new version of the gadget will send alerts to staff if a particular area becomes too crowded. Even Microsoft has partnered with UnitedHealthGroup to make a coronavirus screening app. Both companies are already using the app, which is basically a daily symptom screener, with their employees and has opened it up to others for free. Other solutions being discussed are installing temperature checks at office entryways, which are already commonplace in China and using ultraviolet light to disinfect high-traffic areas. Amazon is already using a thermal camera to take the temperature of its warehouse employees. In a clip shared with "60 Minutes,"the company also showed a prototype UV-light robot, which could be used to disinfect Amazon's warehouses and Whole Foods stores. In the end, what the future of the tech office looks like, maybe up to the employees as much as it'sup to the companies. Corporations probably are going to find themselves in roughly three categories. People who literally cannot goto work because they have kids and so forth and so on. People who don'twant to go to work, or they are worried about exposure because they have co-morbidities and so forth, and people who are just dying to go to work, right? They just can't wait to get out of the house. So my guess is that you're going tosee pods of people which will organize themselves, that this group will beover in this remote place. This group will bein the central office. These people will never come intoeither because they have legitimate fears until this thing gets resolved, which is a long time, and that these little teams will organize in virtualpods and they'll work it out.
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