Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session on the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.
FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the cloud unit’s recent desk-sharing policy for workers, describing a number of the company’s offices as practically empty and reminding staffers that real estate is expensive.
“To me it’s obvious that they are attempting to be efficient and lower your expenses but at the identical time also utilize resources,” Pichai said in a companywide meeting last week, in line with audio obtained by CNBC. “There are people, by the way in which, who routinely complain that they are available and there are big swaths of empty desks and it appears like it’s a ghost town — it’s just not a pleasant experience.”
Pichai’s comments follow a CNBC report last month about Google’s plan to ask cloud employees and partners to share desks on the division’s five largest locations, which include Recent York and San Francisco. The corporate is looking the downsizing effort Cloud Office Evolution, or CLOE.
On Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call in early February, executives said they expect Google to incur costs of about $500 million in the present period related to reduced global office space, as the corporate reckons with slowing revenue growth and ongoing recession concerns.
Pichai indicated there are various people coming to the office “only two days per week,” which he said makes for an inefficient use of current space.
“We should always be good stewards of economic resources,” Pichai said. “We have now expensive real estate. And in the event that they’re only utilized 30% of the time, we’ve to watch out in how we give it some thought.”
At the identical all-hands meeting, Anas Osman, Google Cloud’s strategy and operations vice chairman, said about one-third of employees were coming into the offices at the least 4 days per week, citing data from a pilot the group conducted in regard to returning to physical locations.
As a part of the pilot, Osman said, employees got the choice of getting a dedicated or a shared desk.
“Those 1-to-1 desks actually were utilized roughly 35% of the time at 4 days or more,” Osman said. “We predict that is an excellent balance of how one can each find efficiencies and create a greater experience.”
In some ways, sharing also led to more productivity, he said.
“The information from the pilot shows that Googlers reported significantly higher collaboration after they had assigned days within the office even when that was in a rotational model and a shared desk,” Osman said.
Pichai said that the brand new policy is only for cloud employees in the mean time, and added that the corporate is “giving teams freedom to experiment.” The cloud division makes up roughly 1 / 4 of the corporate’s overall workforce.
Through the meeting, Pichai addressed worker concerns regarding the rollout of the desk-sharing policy and the way it was communicated to the workforce. CNBC previously reported that memes began showing up in the interior Memegen system criticizing the messaging from leadership. One popular meme said, “Not every cost-cutting measure must be word mangled into sounding good for workers.”
In responding to questions and comments submitted by employees, Pichai read one which said, “double speak is disrespectful and frustrating,” and “bad things occur, no must make every bad thing sound like a miracle.”
Pichai said in response: “I agree with the sentiment here. The feedback is valid.”
“We should always all the time strive to be as straightforward as possible,” Pichai said. “I feel it’s essential to grasp at our scale, just about all communication are public in nature. You’re chatting with the world and there are various, many stakeholders and so at times, nuance is very important and words can have a cloth impact and I feel sometimes you see that reflected in a number of the communications.”
A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
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