Mr Pichai stated that the new rule currently only applies to Cloud employees.
Google had recently introduced a desk-sharing policy for its employees and it came under fire for the same. However, now, the Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai has come forward to defend the cost-cutting move of the company. He asserted that the desk-sharing arrangement, known as Cloud Office Evolution, is intended to prevent the office from appearing like a "ghost town" in addition to saving resources, as per a report in CNBC.
According to audio obtained by the outlet, Mr Pichai said in a company meeting last week, "To me it's obvious that they are trying to be efficient and save money but at the same time also utilize resources. 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."
Mr Pichai claimed that many employees attend the office "only two days a week," which he believes results in inefficient use of the available space. "We should be good stewards of financial resources. 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," he continued.
Anas Osman, Vice President of Strategy and Operations for Google Cloud, stated during the same meeting that a third of the workforce was attending the office at least four days per week, based on information from a pilot programme the company ran to encourage people to return to physical locations. Mr Osman mentioned that employees had the choice of a dedicated or shared desk as part of the pilot programme.
"Those 1-to-1 desks actually were utilized roughly 35% of the time at four days or more. We think this is a good balance of how to both find efficiencies and create a better experience." He added that sharing also enabled more productivity. "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," Mr Osman said.
Mr Pichai stated that the new rule currently only applies to Cloud employees and that the company is "giving teams freedom to experiment." Almost one-fourth of the total staff of the company works in the cloud division.