WHILE many companies are coming to terms with working from home for their employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has given TIME magazine 100 a look into the future and predicts that the current arrangements for COVID-19 could become permanent.

He expects that those who are working from home will come into the office from time to time in what he calls “on sites”. However, Pichai “does not see the end of the office as we know it”. Google employees are working from home “until next summer to boost productivity and give workers a sense of certainty during an uncertain time”, he explained.

Pichai told TIME that the company “is making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future” — a future that he says will include hybrid models of work. “I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai added.

Named by TIME among The 100 Most Influential People in the world this year, he still expects workers to come together. “We firmly believe that in person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, [for whenever] you have to create something new — so we don’t see that changing. So, we don’t think the future is just 100 per cent remote or something,” he said.

Google’s high status and reputation offered the green light for other companies which were hesitant to implement work-from-home (WFH) policies. A survey of the company’s employees showed that 62 per cent believe they only need to be in the office “some days”, compared to 20 per cent who said they did not need to come into the office at all.