In a staff meeting that was live-streamed from his personal Facebook page, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would continue to allow many of its employees to work from home permanently, even as the country begins opening up. According to The New York Times, Facebook’s 45,000 employees have been working at home since March and the temporary change has caused the company to reevaluate the idea that employees actually need to work in a shared office in a company that is almost wholly digitally-based. Zuckerberg indicated that within a decade, he expects as many as half of the company’s employees will work from home.
To implement the change, Facebook will start by allowing current employees to apply for permission to work from home, a decision that will be determined by positive work performance, and allow new hires who are senior engineers to work remotely.
The concept of working from home is really catching on in Silicon Valley, it seems (lower costs probably being the reason). The New York Times reports that a week prior to Zuckerberg’s announcement, Jack Dorsey, who leads both Twitter and Square, gave the go-ahead for employees to work from home indefinitely, and Google is allowing their employees to continue working from home until the end of this year.