When we do not know the answer to something we look to Google, so much so that the proper noun has become a verb (actually, it became one officially in 2006 when the Oxford English Dictionary included it).

All of us, individuals, organisations, even administrations, should do that (look to Google) now — when planning for our uncertain short-term (the next one year) future.

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After all, a vaccine won’t be available before the end of the year, and chances are the first vaccines will either not be very effective, or will require multiple booster shots. It is also clear that not everyone is going to get the vaccine immediately. And Google, perhaps aware of all of this (it should be; all the information is available on, er, Google) has decided that its 200,000 employees are not going to return to office before July 2021. This applies to those who work for Google around the world — at its head office in Mountain View, California, but also in countries such the US, UK, India, and Brazil, The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, reported. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its holding company Alphabet, subsequently sent out a message to employees on the decision. “I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months,” WSJ reported him as saying in his message.

I am not suggesting that everyone and every company move to WFH (work from home). My views on that are known to regular readers of this column — it is a luxury (a sub-optimal one) that takes away more than it gives, although in the current context, the scales are tilted strongly in terms of the latter. Commuting by public transport — many of the journalists in the HT newsroom in Delhi, for instance, prefer the Metro, just like many of them in Mumbai depend on the suburban rail network; most of them are working from home currently — is unsafe. As are air-conditioning systems that do not have the right kind of filters or recommended air-circulation cycles. And the social act of sharing the workspace may well be life-threatening.

The big takeaway for me from Google and Pichai’s decision is that it is actually more about stability than flexibility — and a gentle reminder to actually plan for the next year. We have all unconsciously moved to two default planning cycles during the pandemic: the now, and the when-this-is-over. The first helps us survive, get by; the second helps us put things off (and which of us doesn’t like to?). This, despite most of us being aware that the crisis isn’t going to pass anytime soon, perhaps not till a vaccine is discovered and most people have been administered it. And so, to repeat myself, all of us should plan for the next year.

At one level, for instance, Google’s decision makes it clear to employees that they will not be returning to office for the next year (at the least). So, for the next 12 months, they can plan around the certainty that they will be working from home. That’s a big certainty at a time when nothing is really certain. WSJ reports that Pichai’s decision was made, in part, by “sympathy for employees with families to plan for uncertain school years” and by the desire to make it easier for employees to decide where they are going to live for the next year.

It’s probably time for companies in India to also start thinking along these lines — provided they are in businesses that are conducive to remote working, however sub-optimal it may be (at least in the current context, safety is more important than efficiency). And it is definitely time for individuals whose plans for 2020 (and longer) were disrupted by the coronavirus disease to pick up the threads and move on and move ahead.

(ends)