'Feels like it's a ghost town': Sundar Pichai's take on desolate Google offices

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "We should be good stewards of financial resources. We have expensive real estate."

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, recently tried to encourage employees to better utilise the resources on offer and one of them being the company's real estate.

The tech giant had rolled out a new desk-sharing program at five of its locations according to which, the staff was told to coordinate on their alternate days in the office and share their desks with coworkers since many employees have been coming to office only twice a week, CNBC reported.

"To me, it's obvious that they are trying to be efficient and save money but at the same time also utilise resources," Sundar Pichai said at a company meeting last week, the publication reported. "There are people, by the way, who routinely complain that they come in and there are big swaths of empty desks and it feels like it's a ghost town -- it's just not a nice experience."

Although the policy is just for cloud employees now, Pichai said other teams have the "freedom to experiment," CNBC reported.

Reminding the employees again, to utilise the resources available, the Google CEO said, "We should be good stewards of financial resources. We have expensive real estate. And if they're only utilised 30 percent of the time, we have to be careful in how we think about it."

Read more: Google's ex-VP shares top skill looked for at job interviews: 'Very few people had it'

This belt-tightening follows a slew of measures that Google and other tech giants have been following in the wake of a recession. The company has already laid off 12,000 of its employees.

Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson confirmed the company's desk-sharing program, to Business Insider.

The spokesperson, as per the publication, said it developed the new arrangement for Cloud employees after running pilots and surveys and is "combining the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility and focus we've all come to appreciate from remote work, while also allowing us to use our spaces more efficiently."

Read more: Google says fewer of its employees will get promoted this year: Report