Meta’s return-to-office mandate went into effect Tuesday, requiring employees to work from the company’s physical locations at least three days a week.
The company began notifying employees in June of the coming change, which will not affect Meta’s current roster of remote workers. Any employee assigned to an office, however, will need to comply with the rules starting this week.
“We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday in a statement. “In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we’re being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work.”
Facebook parent Meta first extended its remote-work policy to all full-time employees in June 2021. During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company learned that “good work can get done anywhere, and I’m even more optimistic that remote work at scale is possible, particularly as remote video presence and virtual reality continue to improve.”
But since then, many tech giants, such as Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, have reversed course on previous remote work policies, calling on staffers to return to physical offices at least three days a week or potentially face consequences. At Amazon, some employees are being told to relocate to different states to keep their roles, and some have quit rather than adhering to those demands.
As part of Meta’s “Year of Efficiency,” Zuckerberg hinted in a March blog post that he was going to update Meta’s policy after the company conducted an internal analysis that showed engineers who work in person “get more done.”
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.”