Google Employees Feel Being Treated Like ‘School Children’ With Tracking Badges For Attendance – News18

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies have announced working from home permanently. Though bringing them back to offic eis proving to be a tough task. Google is also facing difficulties post-pandemic to bring its employees to work from the office. Last week, the tech giant updated its hybrid three-day-a-week office policy and included a tracking badge to monitor office attendance. The employees who have the approval to work remotely may now have that status reevaluated.

With this update in Google’s hybrid policy, many employees were left disappointed and frustrated and believed that the management is overreaching in its oversight of physical attendance, as per a report by CNBC. The staffers also believed that they were being treated like “school children”.

According to reports, the employees are expressing themselves over meme posts to an internal site called Memegen. “If you cannot attend the office today, your parents should submit an absence request,” reads one post by an employee. The meme is said to have a photoshopped image of human resources head Fiona Cicconi in front of a school blackboard.

Google’s spokesperson, Ryan Lamont said in an email that the badge data collected is aggregated for company leaders. The statement also added that the software giant has fully transitioned to a hybrid work week and the company leaders can see reports which showed how their teams are adopting the model.

An internal document obtained by the publication indicated that the managers will learn who has been constantly being absent from the office and will be mailed for the same. If the employee failed to meet “the local requirements or they can explore other flexibility options.”

Google is known for its vibrant campus life and many expansive offices which also avail the “Googlers” access to massage parlours, yoga classes, video games and free gourmet meals. But during the pandemic, when the offices were closed, the staffers were forced to work from home which led many to relocate to different cities that are now used to more flexibility and family time.

“Thanks to amazing tools like Google Workspace, we can be highly productive from home- particularly when it comes to asynchronous work that requires deep focus,” Cicconi wrote in a memo last week while announcing updates to the hybrid policy.

A software engineer at Google and member of the Alphabet Workers Union CWA, Chris Schmidt, in an email to CNBC, said that the New York City workers “do not even have enough desks and conference rooms for workers to use comfortably”.

Schmidt is referring to Google’s decision to make employees share desks after closing down office spaces in selected locations due to cost-cutting. The report also mentioned that the IT giant is in the process of providing personal lockers to staff for letting them keep their personal items overnight.