More than six in ten adults (63%) have moved to a new community at least once in their lives, while 37% of American adults have never left their hometowns. One community on the West Coast of the United States has been a popular moving destination for young Americans who have large, revolutionary, a tech-related aspirations: Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley, the high-tech hub of the San Francisco Bay Area, is home to some of the country’s and the world’s most influential and innovative organizations. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other companies have not only done incredibly work for the global marketplace, they have essentially reshaped the way companies across the country operate with their revolutionary way of looking at the workplace.
Nowadays, thanks to Google and similar companies opting for more creative work-from-home and telecommuting strategies, both large and small organizations across the U.S. are doing the same thing. Following this witch to telework programs, there have been plenty of benefits that companies have enjoyed. In fact, according to the American Management Association, companies that have implement a telework program realized a 63% reduction in unscheduled absences, leading to a much more productive and efficient workplace.
That might be starting to change, however.
According to ZD Net, Google is now investing billions of dollars into physical office space, prompting companies to take a look at their own work-from-home policies.
Though Google’s main campus is right in Silicon Valley, the company has been recently acquiring a signifiant amount of office space in New York City.
Google’s latest purchase is the landmark Chelsea market building complex in NYC for over $2 billion. The 1.2 million-squee-foot office (and retail) property at 75 Ninth Avenue is already home to Major League Baseball’s network and the Food Network. It’s not just New York offices, either. Google recently spent $820 million on office buildings in Silicon Valley as well.
Google no longer wants its employees, specifically its engineers, working at non-Google environments in order to strengthen company culture and prevent conspiracies. When the best computer programmers in the world work at coffee shops and other locals across Silicon Valley, it only takes a few conversations before a hypothetical Google overthrow begins.
When Google was the industry leader in telecommuting, it had to spend a significant amount of money on company retention and other aspects of business. Now, though the Google employees who enjoyed the freedoms from working from home and other remote locations might miss the old way of doing things, Google seems ready to transform the global workforce once again.
It’s not all bad for the work-from-homers, though. According to a recent Owl Labs State of Remote Work report (which took a look at 1,097) U.S workers), organizations that allow remote work experience 25% lower employee turnover than companies that don’t support telework. Additionally, the survey asked employees who do not work remotely if they would like to work outside their office community at least once a month and 65% said they would.
