Microsoft employees to get bonus worth $1,500 each as pandemic gift

Tech giant Microsoft has decided to give a pandemic bonus worth $1,500 (Rs 1.12 lakh) to its 175,508 employees in view of the challenging fiscal year.

In an internal memo, seen by The Verge, Microsoft has announced that it'll gift a pandemic bonus to all its employees below the level of corporate vice president, who joined on or before March 31, 2021. The part-time workers and those on hourly rates have also been included in it.

The memo says a total of $200 million -- which is equivalent to less than two-day profit of the tech conglomerate -- will be spent on the initiative.

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"Microsoft's chief people officer, Kathleen Hogan, announced the gift to employees today, and it will apply to all eligible employees in both the US and internationally," the memo showed.

LinkedIn, GitHub and ZeniMax, all subsidiaries of Microsoft, are not part of the pandemic bonus initiative.

All major tech companies are giving away special bonuses to their employees in times of Covid-19. Social media giant Facebook recently announced a pandemic bonus worth $1,000 each to its 45,000 employees. E-comm major Amazon also gave its frontline employees $300 worth of 'holiday bonus'.

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In view of new Covid-19 variants emerging across the world, Microsoft has decided to delay the reopening of offices till September this year. The company had earlier said it would reopen Redmond, Washington-based headquarters and other big US facilities in phases from March 29 under its six-phase strategy.

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