Amid the wreckage of Meta’s latest round of layoffs on Tuesday – which laid off an additional 10,000 employees in addition to the 11,000 laid off in November – there is a hint from CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the future of remote work at the company.
In the termination notice, which doubles as a nod to Zuckerberg’s ongoing “Year of Efficiency,” Zuckerberg dedicated an entire section to the issue of “personal time.” His conclusion: In-person work trumps remote work for productivity, at least for new hires.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then moved to remote or stayed in-person performed better, on average, than people who joined remotely,” Zuckerberg said in the memo sent Tuesday. “This analysis also shows that engineers, on average, perform better earlier in their careers when they work face-to-face with teammates at least three days a week.”
He emphasized that the company is “committed to distributed work,” but didn’t rule out changes to its current model. “That means we’re also committed to continuously refining our model to make this work as effective as possible,” he said.
Meta has embraced remote work as part of its quest for the metaverse, maintaining its remote work policy even as Apple and other industry titans pushed hard for a large-scale return to the office in 2022. “At Meta, we’re building a distributed-first future,” reads a section on Meta’s careers page, which includes a glowing quote from Zuckerberg about remote work. (The company cut 5,000 job vacancies on Tuesday, in addition to the mass layoffs.)
The increasing questioning of remote work is shared by the tech elite. Late last year, Marc Benioff — one of the most vocal proponents of remote work in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — said that new hires “in particular face much lower productivity.” He went on to ask if this reduced productivity was “a reflection of our office politics.”
And while Zuckerberg hasn’t made an official statement about the future of remote work at Meta, he promises that “understanding this further” will be an important part of the company’s efficiency year.
“As part of our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on further understanding this and finding ways to ensure people are making the necessary connections to work effectively,” he said in the memo. “In the meantime, I encourage you all to find more opportunities to work personally with your colleagues.”
Meta shares were up more than 7% at the close on Tuesday.