Twitter Turns To Remote Work To Prevent Spread Of Coronavirus

Twitter has started encouraging its workforce to work from home in an effort to reduce risk of workers contracting the Coronavirus. The tech company is believed to be one of the first major companies in the US taking this stance.

Beginning today, we are strongly encouraging all employees globally to work from home if they’re able. Our goal is to lower the probability of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus for us – and the world around us. We are operating out of an abundance of caution and the utmost dedication to keeping our Tweeps healthy.
Twitter Blog post

Twitter employees will still have the choice to go to their offices if they prefer or if their job is harder to carry out remotely:

We are working to make sure internal meetings, all hands, and other important tasks are optimized for remote participation. We recognize that working from home is not ideal for some job functions. For those employees who prefer or need to come into the offices, they will remain open for business.

For workers in specific cities (Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea) working from home is not optional but actually mandatory due to government restrictions in the markets.

Twitter will no doubt also get a number of invaluable lessons because of this setup, which is something they claim to have been in consideration:

While this is a big change for us, we have already been moving towards a more distributed workforce that’s increasingly remote. We’re a global service and we’re committed to enabling anyone, anywhere to work at Twitter.