Meta, Facebook’s mother, is ordering most of its employees to work on-site no less than three days a week starting this fall – the latest move in Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing “efficiency 12 months” at the tech giant, which cut 21,000 jobs.
The change will go into effect on September 5 and can only apply to hybrid employees who’re assigned to a specific Meta office, the company confirmed on Friday.
This doesn’t apply to employees classified as fully distant.
“We’re committed to distributed work and imagine that individuals could make a significant impact each in the office and at home,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement regarding the change.
“We’re also committed to constantly improving our model to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture obligatory for employees to do their best job,” the spokesperson added.
The back-to-office policy modification was the most restrictive of its kind since Zuckerberg embraced distant working flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The corporate has imposed two large rounds of layoffs – 10,000 this spring after shedding 11,000 last fall as Zuckerberg looks to shed expenses and refocus Meta’s operations on the metaverse and artificial intelligence.
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Currently, Meta employees work a median of about 2.2 days per week in the office, according to an internal memo (*3*)obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
About three-quarters of the company’s employees are assigned to the office.
At the end of last 12 months, Meta had roughly 86,000 employees.
In a March blog post, Zuckerberg urged Meta employees to spend more time in the office, although he emphasized that the company was “committed to distributed work.”
“Our early evaluation of performance data suggests that engineers who joined Meta in person after which moved to distant work or stayed in person performed higher on average than those that joined remotely.” Zuckerberg wrote in the post.
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The push to return to offices could exacerbate the morale crisis at Meta, where employees complain of huge layoffs and complain that some top executives are running their branches from locations removed from the company’s California headquarters.
Meta is not the only tech company making changes to its office policies.
Offended Amazon employees staged a high-profile strike on Wednesday in protest of the company’s push to return to the office and its climate policies.
Other corporations, including Google, Apple and Microsoft, have also increased on-site labor requirements.