Microsoft gives workers option of working at home permanently

SEATTLE – Microsoft was among the first corporate giants to send workers home at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, it’s taking steps to let many of those employees work remotely permanently.

The company’s head of human resources, Kathleen Hogan, sent guidelines to managers Sunday, laying out new instructions to let employees do their jobs from home for half their work hours. And the new guidelines lay out considerations for managers to mull with employees who want to work remotely more than half the time.

As the coronavirus first spread in the United States up the West Coast, Microsoft moved in March largely to shut down its offices and require most of its staff to work from home. In May, it extended the work-from-home mandate to October, though it allowed some of its 163,000 workers around the globe to voluntarily return to their offices in stages.

At the time, Microsoft president Brad Smith said in an interview the company expects to bring back employees “more slowly rather than more quickly because, economically, we can serve the economy with more remote work than people in many industries can.”

And in July, the company said it wouldn’t fully reopen its offices until January 2021 at the earliest.

The move to make work from home permanent isn’t without precedent. In May, Twitter told its workers whose jobs didn’t require them to be on site that they could continue working remotely forever. A month later, Slack offered its workers a similar option.

The new Microsoft guidelines, first reported by the Verge, won’t apply to employees whose jobs require them to be on site. The company didn’t disclose how many workers it expected to adopt the new rules.