Google CEO defends desk-sharing policy, says some offices are like a ‘ghost town’
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.
FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the cloud unit’s new desk-sharing policy for employees, describing some of the company’s offices as practically empty and reminding staffers that real estate is pricey.
“To me it’s obvious that they are trying to be efficient and save money but at the same time also utilize resources,” Pichai said in a companywide meeting last week, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “There are people, by the way, who routinely complain that they come in and there are big swaths of empty desks and it feels like it’s a ghost town — it’s just not a nice experience.”
Pichai’s comments follow a CNBC report last month about Google’s plan to ask cloud employees and partners to share desks at the division’s five largest locations, which include New York and San Francisco. The company is calling the downsizing effort Cloud Office Evolution (CLOE).
On Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call in early February, executives said they expect Google to incur costs of about $500 million in the current period related to reduced global office space, as the company reckons with slowing revenue growth and ongoing recession concerns.
Pichai indicated that there are many people coming to the office “only two days a week,” which he said makes for an inefficient use of current space.
“We should be good stewards of financial resources,” Pichai said. “We have expensive real estate. And if they’re only utilized 30% of the time, we have to be careful in how we think about it.”
At the same all-hands meeting, Anas Osman, Google Cloud’s strategy and operations vice president, said about one-third of employees were coming into the offices at least four days a week, citing data from a pilot the group conducted in regards to returning to physical locations.
As part of the pilot, Osman said, employees were given the option of having a dedicated or a shared desk.
“Those one-to-one desks actually were utilized roughly 35% of the time at four days or more,” Osman said. “We think this is a good balance of how to both find efficiencies and create a better experience.”
In some ways, sharing also led to more productivity, he said.
“The data from the pilot shows that Googlers reported significantly better collaboration when they had assigned days in the office even if that was in a rotational model and a shared desk,” Osman said.
Pichai said the new policy is just for cloud employees at the moment, and added that the company is “giving teams freedom to experiment.” The cloud division makes up roughly a quarter of the company’s overall workforce.
During the meeting, Pichai addressed employee concerns regarding the rollout of the desk-sharing policy and how it was communicated to the workforce. CNBC previously reported that memes started showing up in the internal Memegen system criticizing the messaging from leadership. One popular meme said, “Not every cost-cutting measure needs to be word mangled into sounding good for employees.”
In responding to questions and comments submitted by employees, Pichai read one that said, “double speak is disrespectful and frustrating,” and “bad things happen, no need to make every bad thing sound like a miracle.”
Pichai said in response, “I agree with the sentiment here. The feedback is valid.”
“We should always strive to be as straightforward as possible,” Pichai said. “I think it’s important to understand at our scale, pretty much all communication are public in nature. You’re speaking to the world and there are many, many stakeholders and so at times, nuance is important and words can have a material impact and I think sometimes you see that reflected in some of the communications.”
A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Technology
Amazon launches fixed pricing for treatment of conditions such as hair loss. Hims & Hers stock drops 15%
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports7 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Environment1 year agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway