Meta didn’t build those massive offices in the Bay Area just for them to sit empty, you know? | Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Starting today, Meta’s offices are going to be full again. The company has been saying since June that any employee assigned to an office — which means anyone not formally designated as a remote employee — will be required to be in that office at least three days a week. Now, CNBC reports that the mandate has gone into effect.
Over the last three years, Meta went through the same cycle of remote work as an increasingly large number of other tech companies. When the pandemic began, the company found it was surprisingly productive even with everyone at home, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others began to wax poetic about the remote and distributed future of work. Zuckerberg himself estimated that in the next decade, “we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”
As time went on, though, executives began to discover that a lot of things about work are simply harder to do through a webcam and a chat window and began to try to bring people back to the office without upsetting those who had gotten used to having no commute and no nearby co-workers. And then, this year, the company simply stopped caring about the backlash and told everyone to come back.
Bringing workers back to the office also seems to be part of Meta’s plan to bring more speed and efficiency to the company, which has meant significant reorganizations and layoffs in recent months. Earlier this year, in a note to staff, Zuckerberg wrote that while the company was committed to distributed work, “our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.” The company found that younger and newer employees in particular performed better in an in-person environment.
Three days a week in the office seems to be the going rate in Silicon Valley. Most Google employees are in the office three days a week, and Amazon has been enforcing the same policy since May. And if you can’t get behind that, CEO Andy Jassy told employees recently, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week.” Apple employees have been working in-person three days a week for almost exactly a year.
Even the companies building tech to enable remote work are bailing on the concept. Zoom, maybe the company most benefitted by the rise of remote work, recently told staff that they’re expected to be in the office two days a week if they live within 50 miles of an office. Meta, of course, is investing billions in the metaverse and specifically the idea that the office of the future may be inside your Quest headset. (Now with legs!) But like so many other companies, it’s deciding that the best way to build the remote-everything future is to do it in person.