Just days after Jack Dorsey announced permanent remote working for Twitter and Square employees, his counterpart Mark Zuckerberg announced a similar move for Facebook employees globally.
In a publicly broadcasted live stream, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Inc will shift toward more permanently embracing remote work even after coronavirus lockdowns ease.
In his May 21 announcement, Zuckerberg estimated that approximately half of the tech giant’s 50,000 employees around the world will be permanently working outside the office within the next five to 10 years.
Zuckerberg also said that the world’s largest social network would start “aggressively opening up remote hiring.” Starting in about a week, the company will be making the majority of its US job openings eligible for remote hiring and later this year will roll out a policy allowing employees to apply for permanent remote work arrangements. This means that many of the 10,000 product and engineering hires announced in April will potentially be remote hires.
“Being able to recruit more broadly, especially across the US and Canada to start with, is going to open up a lot of new talent that previously wouldn’t have considered moving to a big city,” Zuckerberg said.
He further suggested that shifting the workforce to remote work is in line with Facebook’s product strategy, in that it drives the adoption of Facebook’s collaborative tools among its own employees.
However there’s a catch to this new remote working process, Zuckerberg also said that while employees could work remotely, their paychecks would be modified to reflect local costs of living. The tech giant would earlier give new employees a bonus to live near the Menlo Park area.
He said employees have to update the company on their new locations by 1 January 2021, so that their salaries could be adjusted accordingly. He added that employees who attempt to sidestep these modified compensation adjustments will be subject to severe ramifications as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.
He also informed the employees about the monitoring policy of Facebook for the remote workers. He said that Facebook will monitor its employees’ locations by checking where they access its VPN. Facebook also uses its own apps to track employee locations, and has done so in the past to track interns who didn’t report for work.
The move to embrace remote working however will not imply layoffs for those in California. “Company is not planning layoffs or compulsory moves or salary adjustments for employees who opt to stay in the Bay Area,” a Facebook spokesperson said to Reuters.
Earlier, the company had announced that it has allowed its employees to work remotely till the end of the year. The company had also asked its contractual content moderators to also work remotely amid the growing cases of coronavirus in the US. However, the company will open its offices for essential jobs in July.
Like many other companies, Facebook will reopen its offices but with significantly reduced occupancy. The reopening is scheduled to begin on July 6 and occupancy will be only 25 percent of pre-COVID numbers, according to a prior announcement. However, the reduced occupancy is going to be permanent.
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