After Google, Facebook tells staff to work from home till mid-2021

Facebook has told its 48,000-strong workforce to stay at home through July 2021 and is giving an additional $1,000 to each employee to buy supplies for a home office.

The social network had earlier allowed the staff to work remotely through the end of 2020.

"Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021..

"In addition, we are giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs," a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying in The Verge on Thursday.

With the COVID-19 pandemic hardly showing any sign of slowing down, Google last month said it would allow its nearly 2 lakh employees to work from home till the middle of next year if their roles permit.

"To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through June 30, 2021 for roles that don't need to be in the office," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees.

Google had earlier set January 2021 as a tentative timeline for its workers to return to offices.

Twitter has allowed employees to work from home "forever" if they wish so.

In May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out a detailed remote-working plan to make half of his workforce work from home by 2030.

According to him, about half of Facebook employees would work from home five to 10 years from now.

While Amazon and Apple expect their employees to return to their respective offices in January, most other tech companies also appeared to be hoping work from home to last till the end of the year.