Meta announces plans to enforce stricter in-office work mandate
After Meta laid off 21,000 employees in seven months, executives have decided to fill back up the offices.
The social media giant notified employees Thursday that those who aren’t fully remote will need to come into the office three days a week starting Sept. 5, marking the Bay Area-based company’s strictest return-to-office policy since the pandemic began.
“Coming into the office means we spend time commuting and have less personal flexibility,” said an internal post viewed by The Information, which first reported the change. “But it supports collaboration and the energy that comes from working alongside your team, which are critical as we build the future.”
The change will substantially increase traffic in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters and offices around the world — employees average 2.2 days a week in the office and only a quarter are fully remote, according to an internal memo viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. After finishing its current layoff round, the company will still have more than 65,000 employees.
In a statement to SFGATE, a Meta spokesperson said the company is “confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home,” and that the firm is refining its hybrid model “to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work.”
The new policy doesn’t affect fully remote employees, who still can work from home all week. But Meta continues to bar managers from opening more of those positions, a rule the company enacted earlier this year in the midst of its layoff rounds. At the time, a spokesperson said such listings had been “temporarily paused.”
Several major companies across the tech industry have been prodding their employees back into offices after embracing remote work during the pandemic. But employees at Meta have seen a particularly stark turnaround. In May 2020, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Verge that his firm would become “the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale” and speculated that half the company could be permanently remote within a decade.
Zuckerberg also embraced this vision in his product focus, pouring billions of dollars into virtual and augmented reality research. He unveiled the Meta Quest Pro headset last October, designed for collaborative, remote work. A company blog post said the headset would “help you feel more present even if you’re physically apart.”
However, for 2023, which Zuckerberg dubbed Meta’s “year of efficiency,” employees have seen a remote-first culture melt away. In March, as the executive announced another 10,000 layoffs on top of November’s massive cut, he wrote that an early analysis suggested in-person workers were performing better on average than their remote counterparts.
He added that early-career engineers do better when they’re working in-person three days a week. Come September, most of Meta’s staff will have no other choice.
Hear of anything happening at Meta? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
Source: SFGATE
