The Landscape of the Post-Pandemic Return to Office But over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs in millions of square feet of space, or about 10 percent of its global work spaces. At first, the interior of Google’s buildings may not appear all that different.
The company will encourage - but not mandate - that employees be vaccinated when they start returning to the office, probably in September. Google is creating a post-pandemic workplace that will accommodate employees who got used to working from home over the past year and don’t want to be in the office all the time anymore. Now, the company that once redefined how an employer treats its workers is trying to redefine the office itself. The food was free, and so were buses to and from work: Getting to the office, and staying there all day, was easy. The airy, open offices and whimsical common spaces set a standard for what an innovative workplace was supposed to look like.
In 2003, five years after its founding, the company moved into a sprawling campus called the Googleplex. Google’s first office was a cluttered Silicon Valley garage crammed with desks resting on sawhorses.
