SUMMARY
The COVID-19 fund by Google will help temporary staff and vendors worldwide
The fund will also be used to spread awareness among teams and reduce office schedules
Google had asked 100K employees in the US to work from home
With the coronavirus outbreak taking centre-stage across the globe, tech giant Google has taken a big step to help those in its global, extended workforce who have been showing symptoms of the Covid-19 disease as well as those who are in self-quarantine or state-imposed quarantine.
In its blog post titled ‘Supporting Our Extended Workforce Through COVID-19 Outbreak,’ Google said it will set up a dedicated fund to help its temporary staff and vendors globally to take paid sick leave if they show any of the Covid-19 symptoms, or are unable to come to work because they are quarantined.
The extended workforce may include third-party service providers, contractors, consultants and other part-time staff working on a designated project among others.
Further, Google said that it will carefully monitor the situation and continue to assess any adjustments needed in the upcoming months. Additionally, this fund will be utilised to spread awareness among the teams and to cover for the reduced office schedules it announced earlier.
Google had asked its 100K employees across North America to work from home as a measure to prevent coronavirus from spreading. The decision comes after several coronavirus cases were being reported in the US.
Coronavirus outbreak has created a big shift across businesses and daily activity of customers globally. Globally, more than 1.2 Lakh coronavirus cases and over 4,382 deaths have been reported, and in India, over 60 confirmed cases of coronavirus have been reported, at the time of publishing.
Meanwhile, several startups and companies in India have advised their employees to avoid travelling and have even asked them to work from home. Zoho was one of the first to allow work from home for its employees and many others have followed suit. The company is offering Zoho Remotely product to companies across the world free of cost.
Ecommerce giant Flipkart has issued an advisory to its employees and supply chain staff across all its establishments to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The company has suspended all domestic and international business travel with immediate effect. It has also organised awareness sessions across all its facilities on how our employees and partners can minimise their exposure by following simple precautionary measures and good hygiene practices in line with the guidelines issued by the health ministry.
Edtech unicorn BYJU’S has announced that it will be providing free access to its educational app to students till the end of April 2020. All K-12 students can download and access BYJU’S learning content for free.
