What The FAANG CEOs Think About The Work-From-Home Environment

A shift to working from home for many companies has been a big trend throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here's what CEOs from some of the world's biggest companies have said about the trend since the onset of the pandemic.

The Positives: “I think it made sense for the health and safety of our employees. I felt that, given a lot of our work could be done from home, it made sense for us to contribute to social distancing,” Google GOOG CEO Sundar Pichai said in May.

“Everybody’s getting used to the work at home. In some areas of the company people may even be more productive, in some other areas they’re not as productive,” Apple Inc. AAPL CEO Tim Cook said in April.

The company has seen an increase in large orders of iPads to school systems due to remote learning and companies like Peloton for work from home efforts.

“The thing that’s been positively surprising to people is that people are more productive working at home than people would have expected. A lot of people are actually saying that they’re more productive now,” Facebook, Inc. FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in May.

Facebook is also beginning to hire people for remote working, opening up to a job pool of people who don’t live near a Facebook office.

The Negatives: Netflix, Inc. NFLX CEO Reed Hastings told The Wall Street Journal this week there are no positive benefits to working from home.

“No, I don’t see any positives,” Hastings said. “Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, in a pure negative."

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN CEO Jeff Bezos believes his employees need to work in person.

“Much of the essential work we do cannot be done from home,” Bezos said in a note to employees in March.

See Also: Work From Home ETF Off To A Wonderful Start

What’s Next: Many of the companies have pushed return to office dates into 2021. Hastings appeared more optimistic of getting Netflix employees back as soon as possible.

“Twelve hours after a vaccine is approved,” Hastings responded to a question of how quickly his workforce would return.

“We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” Zuckerberg promises. “Over the next five to ten years, I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently,” Zuckerberg said based on employee surveys.

Google and Apple have extended their work from home policies into the summer of 2021. Other technology companies like Twitter TWTR and Square SQ, are allowing their employees to work from home permanently.