And so the journey to permanent remote working begins

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

”At OpenText, the last two months have also been an experiment in remote work at scale. Over the course of one week, more than 95% of OpenText employees moved to remote work and have maintained productivity throughout.

Given this, OpenText will not reopen approximately 50% of our offices and will institute a hybrid model with those employees continuing to work from home. These are smaller offices and will be closed permanently. Our corporate offices, our centers of excellence, innovation centers and country head offices will re-open when we are able to do so.” — Mark Barrenechea, OpenText CEO.

“Barrenechea is saying out loud what a lot of C-level executives are thinking. The new normal will require less commercial real estate as the capital expenses required can be deployed elsewhere.”

This of course is smart business. Quotes taken from this piece over at ZDNet entitled OpenText won’t reopen half of its physical offices post COVID-19 pandemic