Mastercard won’t ask staff to return to office until virus concerns abate

Mastercard Inc. will allow staff to work from home until they are comfortable returning without fear of contracting the coronavirus.

“We expect in the coming weeks and months that more employees will continue to work from home than come into the office,” Chief People Officer Michael Fraccaro told Reuters. “And we are OK with that. We support that choice.”

Fraccaro said the company is also considering office consolidation and examining its real estate footprint, according to the news service. The world’s second-biggest payment processor is headquartered in Westchester, N.Y., and employs nearly 20,000 people worldwide.

Fraccaro added that a potential scenario in which physical offices are about 30 percent full has the company thinking about the future of its real estate needs. The credit card company has created a “future of work” task force to determine the way forward, according to Reuters.

About 90 percent of Mastercard’s workforce is currently working remotely in both the U.S. and overseas locations such as Beijing and Shanghai, and employees working in offices are subject to social distancing, temperature checks and mask requirements.

“Once there is adequate testing and there is a vaccine and people feel comfortable to return, then we may see more,” Fraccaro told Reuters. “But in the early phases it will be vastly less than what we had.”

The report comes the week after Twitter, which called for all employees to begin working remotely in March, announced that some workers will be able to permanently work from home after restrictions are lifted.

“We’ve been very thoughtful in how we’ve approached this from the time we were one of the first companies to move to a work-from-home model,” a representative for Twitter told BuzzFeed last week. “We’ll continue to be, and we’ll continue to put the safety of our people and communities first.”

“People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way,” said Jennifer Christie, the company’s head of human resources. “Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”