Facebook Chief Executive Officer and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, leaving the Merrion Hotel in Dublin after meeting with Irish politicians to discuss regulation of social media, transparrency in political advertising and the safety of young people and vulnerable adults. On Tuesday, April 2, 2019, in Dublin, Ireland.
Artur Widak | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declared that 2023 is the company’s “year of efficiency,” and according to a release, that includes “refining” Meta’s distributed work model.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg shared a memo with employees announcing plans to lay off an additional 10,000 workers and incur restructuring costs. Meta previously laid off 11,000 employees late last year.
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As part of the announcement, Zuckerberg said that an internal analysis of employee performance data suggests that engineers who work in person “get more done.” He said Meta remains committed to distributed work, but he encouraged employees to find more opportunities to work with one another in person.
“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. “This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.”
Meta was one of the first tech companies to allow its employees to begin working remotely during the early days of the covid pandemic. The company carried its flexible-work policies into 2021 when it announced that workers at all levels of the company could request to work remotely full-time.
Meta is still promoting remote roles in 2023, and many employees have the option to work in person. But as major tech companies like Amazon suddenly announced plans to return to the office at least three days a week earlier this year, Meta may have started to reconsider its position.
“This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively,” Zuckerberg said.