Zuckerberg orders Meta staff back to office three days a week

MARK ZUCKERBERG has ordered staff back into the office three days a week following a reversal in policy from one of Silicon Valley’s biggest advocates of remote work.

Meta has told employees who do not have permission to work from home they will have to come into work at least three out of five days from September.

The move is the latest crackdown on working from home from big tech companies – some of the first businesses to commit to telecommuting.

Previously, how often staff had to come into the office was determined by individual managers. The change will not affect a minority of staff – roughly one in four – who are allowed to work from home permanently.

“We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home,” Meta said.

It added: “We’re also committed to continuously refining our model to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work.” Mr Zuckerberg had championed remote working as a successful experiment during the pandemic, saying he expected thousands of employees to move away from tech hubs and that all staff could apply to work from home.

However, the company recently stopped recruiting for remote-only roles and Mr Zuckerberg said that new joiners had performed better if they regularly came into the office.

“Our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in-person,” he said, adding that “engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week”.

Mr Zuckerberg spent much of last year working from Hawaii while Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, recently returned to California from London.

Meta staff currently spend about 2.2 days on average per week in the office, the company told employees.

It comes as rival tech companies including Google, Apple and Amazon have demanded workers spend more time in the office, raising protests among some parts of their workforces.

Meta has cut tens of thousands of jobs this year in what Mr Zuckerberg has called the “year of efficiency”.