Meta orders workers back to office 3 days per week after layoffs

Facebook parent Meta is ordering most of its employees to work on site at least three days per week beginning this fall — the latest move in Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing “year of efficiency” at the tech giant that has slashed 21,000 jobs.

The change will take effect on Sept. 5 and will only apply to hybrid employees who are assigned to a specific Meta office, the company confirmed Friday.

Employees who are classified as fully remote are not affected.

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

“We’re also committed to continuously refining our model to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work,” the spokesperson added.

The return-to-office policy tweak was the strictest of its kind since Zuckerberg embraced remote work flexibility during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company has imposed two major rounds of layoffs — 10,000 this spring after shedding 11,000 last fall as Zuckerberg looks to shed expenses and refocus Meta’s business on the metaverse and artificial intelligence.

At present, Meta employees work an average of approximately 2.2 days per week in the office, according to an internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

About three-quarters of the company’s workforce is assigned to an office.

Meta had roughly 86,000 employees as of the end of last year.

Zuckerberg nudged Meta employees to spend more time in the office in a March blog post, even as he insisted that the company was “committed to distributed work.”

“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 said in the post.

The return-to-office push could exacerbate a morale crisis at Meta, where employees have grumbled about the major layoffs and griped that some top executives have been directing their divisions from locations far away from the company’s California headquarters.

Meta isn’t the only tech firm making changes to its office policy.

On Wednesday, furious Amazon workers staged a high-profile walkout in protest of the company’s return-to-office push and its climate policies.

Other firms, including Google, Apple and Microsoft, have also ramped up their onsite work requirements.