Google To Reopen Downtown Office In April

As COVID cases decline, businesses are looking to regain the losses caused by the virus. Google, for example, shut many of its offices at the beginning of the pandemic. Most of its workers haven’t been required to be back in the office. This will change in April. 

A hybrid approach is slated to take affect. Google employees will return to its downtown Portland office April 4 but will only be required to be on site three days a week.

 Umpqua Bank is one of the companies that will not be coming back. It is moving its Oregon offices to Lake Oswego and corporate headquarters to Tacoma, Washington. Some companies reduced their downtown offices while many large employers have retained their downtown offices.

As a result of the new model, most employees must be back in the office three days a week, with the option of working remotely two days. Google is a major company with 80 employees in its Portland office. The company never fully occupied the space it has in downtown Portland.

Google now counts 220 employees assigned to the downtown office. The online company is among the first to reopen its downtown office. Portland city employees, for example, are still primarily remote.

Googl’s return to downtown could be a boost for the city. According to a study based on aggregated smartphone data a third as many people work downtown as did prior to the pandemic.

The company has been in the news recently. Last Thursday Google said that it had stopped selling online advertising in Russia. This ban also covers search, YouTube and outside publishing partners.

Google is the world’s top seller of online ads by revenue.  “In light of the extraordinary circumstances, we’re pausing Google ads in Russia,” the company said in a statement. “The situation is evolving quickly, and we will continue to share updates when appropriate.”

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include a search engine, online advertising technologies, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Oregon paid 288 state employees $3.2 million to stay home last year.