Microsoft announced on Monday that it would begin allowing more workers back into its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, starting on March 29.

In this stage of reopening, which Microsoft described as Step 4 in a six-step “dial”, the Redmond campus will give non-essential on-site employees the choice to work from the office, home or a combination of both.

Microsoft will also continue to require employees to wear masks and maintain social distancing.

Microsoft plans to open its office without restrictions only once the virus acts “more like an endemic virus such as the seasonal flu,” wrote Kurt DelBene, an executive vice-president at the tech giant.

But even then, office life for Microsoft’s 160,000 employees is not likely to look like what it did before the
pandemic.

“Once we reach a point where Covid-19 no longer presents a significant burden on our communities, and as our sites move to the open stage of the dial, we view working from home part of the time (less than 50 per cent) as standard for most roles,” DelBene wrote on the company blog.

Microsoft also released on Monday the results of a survey that shows the work force has changed after a year of working remotely.

In the survey of more than 30,000 full-time and self-employed workers, 73 per cent said they wanted flexible remote work options to continue, and 46 per cent said they were planning to move this year now that they could work remotely.

“There are some companies that think we’re just going to go back to how it was,” Jared Spataro, the corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said in an interview.

“However, the data does seem to indicate that they don’t understand what has happened over the last 12 months.”

New York Times News Service