All North American Googlers advised to work from home due to coronavirus

Google last Thursday let all Bay Area employees work from home in response to COVID-19. The company today is asking all Googlers in North America to work remotely as a means of combatting the coronavirus through social distancing.

There are 26 Google offices in the United States and Canada — Mexico is organizationally grouped as part of Latin America by the company. This policy is in effect until at least April 10 (via Business Insider) and applies to all employees except those “critical to business continuity.”

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a tweet this afternoon said the social distancing measure helps reduce community spread of COVID-19, and called on other companies to “contribute” if they can.

Contributing to social distancing if you are able to, helps the overall community spread and most importantly, will help offset the peak loads through critical healthcare systems and also saves it for people in need. (based on expert advice). Please contribute if you are able to

Meanwhile, Google today had more to say about about its “extended workforce.” As part of changes announced last year, technical temporary staff that work on “short-term projects” are in the process of getting paid sick leave.

As we’re in a transition period in the U.S.—and to cover any gaps elsewhere in the world—Google is establishing a COVID-19 fund that will enable all our temporary staff and vendors, globally, to take paid sick leave if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19, or can’t come into work because they’re quarantined. Working with our partners, this fund will mean that members of our extended workforce will be compensated for their normal working hours if they can’t come into work for these reasons.

Since that change is not fully rolled out by Google’s partners, it will be compensating employees that take time off due to the coronavirus. This joins workers responsible for staffing cafes and maintaining office upkeep getting paid for the hours they would have had if not for closures.