Facebook's tens of thousands of employees were working from home for just two months when Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction: In a few years, half of the company's employees won't come to the office regularly.
«I think 50% of our employees could work remotely,» Zuckerberg said in May 2020, talking about the benefits of being an employee rather than being chained to a desk. for example, more diverse employment and less pollution.
«There are several obvious advantages to working remotely.»
Two years later, Zuckerberg appears to have changed his mind.
When Zuckerberg announced massive layoffs at Facebook parent company Meta earlier this year, Zuckerberg suggested that employees perform better in the office — at least early in their careers.
“Engineers who either joined Meta in person and then moved to remote work or stayed with it performed better on average than those who joined remotely,” Zuckerberg said.
“Our hypothesis is in that it's still easier to build trust personally.»
While he said that Meta remains committed to «distributed work,» the announcement marked a shift in thinking that has reverberated throughout the tech industry: employees want to return to their jobs.< /p>
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassi has ordered employees to return to the office at least three days a week from next month, following Apple's move in September. On Twitter, Elon Musk has largely changed the policy of allowing employees to work completely remotely, to the point where some of them sleep in the office.
The dictates contrast with the early days of the pandemic, when big tech was at the forefront of what was then seen as a long-term revolution in how people work. Google, Twitter and Facebook were among the first employers to send people home in early March 2020, when the number of reported Covid cases in the US was in the hundreds.
Young, tech-savvy employees have easily adapted to replacing human contact with video calls and instant messaging services, some of which they have developed. Rising demand for digital tools, streaming services, and social media has meant that big tech companies have been forced to hire thousands of new employees without induction.
Stock prices have risen, making employees wealthy, and many have found they can live like before. kings outside the expensive technology hubs they used to live in.
A few weeks later, Twitter announced that employees would be able to work from home permanently. Apple CEO Tim Cook applauded the efforts of employees after a number of recently launched products led to record sales.
“There are worse things for an innovation company than having to periodically do almost everything in a completely new way.” «, he told investors.
Apple employees refused to return to the office on Tim Cook's orders, claiming it would make the company «whiter and more masculine.» Photo: Noah Berger/AP. 2021 and 2022 working from home, and that anyone who wishes to move overseas will receive support.
Companies have been taking half-hearted steps to bring employees back to the office as vaccines have become widely available, but the emergence of Delta options and Omicron gave them a convenient excuse to delay the opening.
As recently as last summer, working from home seemed like a permanent trend. Office occupancy in the San Francisco tech hub was just 32 percent last June, according to security firm Kastle. «Office errands never work,» said Marc Benioff of Salesforce, the city's largest private employer.
When the manual was introduced, it was little applied, especially in the back offices. Employees at Facebook and Google's UK offices say they actually had a free vote for most of the past year on whether to go to work.
The workers who were asked to return protested, pointing out they had options elsewhere, with companies like Coinbase, Dropbox and Airbnb saying they would allow remote work permanently.
In August, Apple employees filed a petition against Cook's order announcing that employees would have to return to work three days a week. Other workers took more radical steps. In February, YouTube contractors announced plans to go on strike to protest plans to return to the office; a previous strike by Google Maps workers delayed returns to the office.
However, a brutal and widespread technological downturn has changed the picture. Since the beginning of the year, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon have laid off thousands of employees as rising interest rates hit their stock prices.
The financial pressure has made tech bosses more aware of the multi-billion dollar investments they have made at their currently underserved headquarters, such as Apple's Silicon Valley spaceship and the Frank Gehry-designed Meta campus. In addition, power has shifted from employee to employer.
Apple has taken half-hearted steps to get employees back into the office. vaccines became widely available. Photo: Steve Proehl/Corbis Unreleased
“Technology firms are cutting staff right now, and they will primarily aim to cut people who will not come to the office,” says Thomas Rule, an assistant professor of organization theory at the University of Cambridge, who studies the policy of home work. . “People who can't be seen, people who stay at home because they think tech firms will be super-agile, they'll be first in line because their bosses have never seen them. And they're not tied to the culture of the organization.»
Amazon boss Andy Jassi said in February: «There's something about being face to face with someone, looking into their eyes and seeing that he is completely immersed in what you are discussing, which brings people together.»
Things are slowly changing even at Meta, where Zuckerberg spent part of the past year working from Hawaii and where executives are scattered around the world (Sir Nick Clegg, his president of global communications, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri are in London). , and WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart lives in Los Angeles).
Last week, the company stopped advertising completely removed jobs, although a spokesperson said it was temporary.
The shift is happening across the tech industry. According to data from job site Adzuna, the number of UK tech jobs advertised as completely remote has dropped from 39% last April to 27% last month. Hybrid jobs, which include a combination of office and home work, rose from 20% to 29%, while office roles rose from 7.7% to 9.1% (the rest are ads that are unspecified) . The changes are similar in the US, although more positions are being advertised as completely remote.
«As the pandemic slowly becomes ancient history, employers are becoming stricter on return-to-the-office policies, whether that means returning to full or partial office,” says Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter.
Last year, Cook called remote work “the mother of all experimentation.”
Now that experiment seems to be coming to an end.
How Why do you think working from home wasn't as successful as originally thought? Share your thoughts in the comments section below
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