Tech giants are embracing remote work. Others may follow

 For a preview of future of office work, watch how biggest tech companies are preparing for a post-pandemic world.

Silicon Valley and Seattle giants — Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter — were first to send ir employees home as virus spre to U.S. w y're among last to return m to office. Some of ir employees might never go back.

companies are studying what ir highly-paid, highly-valued employees want, using ir own techlogy to make remote work easier and looking to hire new workers outside of big city hubs. It's a potentially huge turnaround after years in which companies like Amazon and Google chased scarce tech talent by opening or expanding offices in hip urban locations such as San Francisco and New York.

Such a shift might also amount to a repudiation of tion that creative work demands corporate campuses reminiscent of college, with free food, ping pong tables and open office plans designed to encour unplanned interactions.

result could re-imagine t just Silicon Valley but or cities as companies expand hiring in places like Atlanta, Dallas and Denver, where Facebook plans to open new “hubs” for its new, mostly remote hires.

Change won't happen quickly, though. “We want to make sure we move forward in a measured way,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an employee town hall Thursday that was brocast live on his Facebook p.

Facebook, which has nearly 45,000 employees, is looking five to 10 years down line as it plans for more remote work, even when COVID-19 is longer a threat that requires most of its employees to work from home. Since coronavirus has upended work and office life, even companies with fewer resources and slower-moving cultures are likely to follow.

“Many companies are learning that ir workers are just as or even more productive working from home,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Zuckerberg said a Facebook employee survey found that about 20% of workers were “extremely or very interested” in moving to full-time remote work after virus-related restrictions are lifted. Ar 20% were “somewhat” interested and largest group wanted flexibility, with some remote and some in-office work. Eventually, Zuckerberg said, as many as half of Facebook's workers could be working remotely. But he cautioned that this is years, perhaps even a dece, away.

Twitter went even furr, anuncing last week that it will allow some employees to work from home on a permanent basis, a plan CEO Jack Dorsey hatched before coronavirus. His or company, Square, which like Twitter is based in San Francisco, is doing same. Some new U.S.-based job listings for Twitter give option for hires to work in cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C. but also remotely full time anywhere in country.

It's too early to kw wher remote work options will mean an exodus of highly-paid tech workers from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where y've contributed to skyrocketing rents and housing prices. But Facebook's employee survey suggests that at least some of its employees would leave San Francisco Bay Area if given option.

For companies that have built ir empires on letting people communicate with far-flung friends and colleagues, moving toward remote work is t too hard of a sell. But re are many challenges. Collaboration, spontaneity, face-to-face interactions that aren't on a scheduled call — all look different when people are working alone from ir homes.

re are also some jobs — in Facebook's case, toughest content reviewing that deals with suicides, child abuse and or traumatizing material; sales; building, upgring and maintaining data centers; lawyers who have to be in court and so on — that can't be done remotely.

Newer employees, especially recent college grs or those with little experience and lower performers might also fall into this group, Zuckerberg said. At Facebook, CEO said employees will have to meet certain criteria to be considered for permanent remote work. This includes a level of seniority, strong performance and, naturally, being part of a team that supports remote work.

For w, workers at Facebook, Google, Twitter and elsewhere can work remotely through 2020. At Microsoft, employees can work from home until October. But company's work-from-home flexibility has fit with software giant’s broer effort to capitalize on what CEO Satya Nella calls a shift to “remote everything.”

“Every organization will increasingly need ability at a moment’s tice to remote everything from manufacturing to sales, to customer support," Nella said this week at company’s Build developer conference.

company's chief techlogy officer, Kevin Scott, h alrey been working a lot from home, in part because he is based in Silicon Valley and most of rest of leership team is in Redmond, Washington.

“We are all on this accelerated timeline figuring out how to work from home.... It’s learning culture and rhythms of interacting with your colleagues by video conference and doing your work remotely," he said, speaking t just of Microsoft but workplaces in general. "That is getting so much better so quickly that I don’t think I’m going to be commuting nearly as frequently as I was before.”