Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is aiming to update workers on the company's remote-work policy this summer, but he's not going to eliminate it completely
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- Mark Zuckerberg said during a meeting that Meta may update its remote work policy this summer.
- The CEO said the company does not plan to eliminate all remote work.
- Earlier this week, he said performance data showed in-person work benefited engineers.
Mark Zuckerberg hinted on Thursday that Meta may be looking to change its remote work policy.
During an all-hands meeting following a lay-off announcement earlier this week, the CEO responded to a question from an employee around the company's remote work policy. Zuckerberg said that while the company plans to "continue to support remote work," it will analyze performance data and potentially "update" the policy.
"I want to be clear upfront that we're not going to eliminate all remote work or anything like that," Zuckerberg said during the meeting, according to a video recording that was viewed by Insider.
Zuckerberg added that while the "vast majority" of employees have said they "want to be in offices a bunch of the time," he wants to find a balance between in-person work and "focused work."
"My sense is we're still not seeing teams work together in the office as much as intuitively I would hope and expect would be optimal, and we're also starting to get some data points that suggest we should be doing more there," he said, adding that while he does not want to mandate in-office work, he wants to find a "kind of cultural equilibrium."
The Meta CEO said the company plans to analyze data around in-office work and determine the best policy going forward.
"Honing the next generation of the distributed work policies and hybrid work is one of the next things that I want to try to work on once we're through this," Zuckerberg told staff, referring to Meta's restructuring process which he has said will likely carry into May. He added that the company aims to have more information on how it may "update" the policy sometime during the summer.
The billionaire mentioned the subject of in-office work in a layoff announcement earlier this week. In the post, he said that the company had looked through "performance data" and found that engineers who joined Meta in person or stayed in person performed better than those who joined remotely and continued to work remotely. Zuckerberg also said that the analysis indicated that working in person at least three days a week was beneficial to early-career engineers.
Meta was one of the first companies to allow its employees to work from home during the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, the company changed its policy to allow for employees who can perform their job duties remotely to apply to work from home permanently. At the time, Zuckerberg said he planned to work remotely for about half the year as it made him "happier and more productive," according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment to Insider.
The all-hands meeting was Zuckerberg's first opportunity to respond to questions from staff after he announced earlier this week that the company plans to lay off about 10,000 employees. During the meeting, another Meta worker asked the CEO how staff could trust his leadership decision after a second round of job cuts.
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