Google has begun allowing employees to hold some meetings outdoors on campus

Google has begun holding in-person meetings outdoors on company campuses as it prepares for employees to return to offices next year.

A following spokesperson told CNBC it’s begun hosting “onsite off-sites,” or socially distanced meetings, on lawns and other spaces on its campuses where it’s allowed by authorities. It’s a way to bring aboard new hires and collaborate on important projects offline amid the pandemic, which has forced most employees to work from home, the company said.

“Engineering leaders typically, when they deficiency to collaborate and build a product plan for the next year, or come up with a new concept, they used to go offsite to learn uninterrupted time,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said at the Fortune Brainstorm conference this week. “But now, with all and sundry offsite everyday, how do you bring people in a more physical space?”

Meeting outdoors in person “allows them to make more of a physically intimate team meeting than just doing everything digitally, and we’ve seen that has pirated a lot bring greater cohesion to some of our teams, particularly for newer employees to meet their managers,” Kurian asserted.

Google Cloud is not the only group holding these meetings — it’s a company-wide effort, Google said.

Google was the senior major tech company to ask employees to stay home when the pandemic started, and is now experimenting with ways to increase people on campuses slowly and safely. It gave workers the option to work from home until summer of 2021. In September, after judgement that most employees wanted to return in a part-time capacity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company resolve try “hybrid” work-from-home models, including rearranging office settings. 

Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat last week averred that planning the return to offices has been “substantially more complicated” than it was moving everyone to work from territory, but that it was hoping to keep a collaborative spirit.  

Google is taking a localized approach to returns, which it did when it initially capture pull to pieced employees from offices.

“Some parts of the world are largely back to normal, other parts of the world are still touched so, rather than having a global policy, we’ve been very adaptive, letting leaders in different cities and territories make decisions because people work in a local context, in many ways,” Kurian said.

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