Coronavirus Impact Being Felt by Big Tech in Pacific Northwest: Business Casual

On this episode of Business Casual, Voice of B2B Daniel Litwin and host Tyler Kern discuss the continued fallout of the spread of coronavirus and the concerns that come alongside it.

As of late, major tech giants in the Pacific Northwest, in particular in Seattle, have had to send employees home to work remotely. The industry’s true juggernauts – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook – have all been affected.

The state now has 70 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 10 deaths as of last week, a number that will likely continue to rise in the coming days and weeks.

According to The Verge’s breakdown of the impacts on these industry giants, Amazon has instituted a full work-from-home policy until the end of March, Facebook has closed a Seattle office and is encouraging the same work-from-home timeline, Google has asked employees to work from home if at all possible, and Microsoft has sent employees home until March 25th.

However, the issues surrounding a seemingly simple effort are numerous. How effective are current remote-work tools? If you feel ill and your allotted time off runs out, is it unethical to return to work? Do work-from-home policies even work?

“It’s really interesting,” Kern said. “Any time something like this happens, it causes you to, on some level, reevaluate the physical being in a place when you can virtually be there and accomplish similar things.”

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