Getty Images

As the coronavirus spreads in the United States and tech companies ask their workforces to do their jobs from home, some in the industry are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will broadly replace working in person.

“We’ll never probably be the same,” Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s head of human resources, told BuzzFeed News of the company’s workplace practices. “People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way. 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.” Twitter — whose CEO, Jack Dorsey, said he wanted to move toward a distributed workforce in the most recent earnings call — is one of a number of companies asking employees to work from home as the coronavirus hits the US. Square, which Dorsey also runs, asked the same of its employees this week. Job board website Indeed has mandated it. Amazon asked employees to test VPNs, anticipating they might need to work from home as well. And some tech workers are starting to clock in from home before their companies roll out an official policy of having most or all of their employees work from home or outside a central office.

“I do think we won’t go back.”

“We've gotten a lot of positive reactions to going in this direction in terms of putting our safety of our employees first,” Christie said, “and so some other companies might be willing to take a leap.”

As of Wednesday, the number of reported coronavirus cases in the US had risen to 153 and the death toll to 11. After Twitter announced its work-from-home policy, some employees remained at the office, but at their discretion. For the most part, the company now has an entirely distributed workforce. On Tuesday, Twitter held its monthly all-hands meeting entirely online — via Google Hangouts and Slack — with Dorsey dialing in from an undisclosed location.