Facebook parent Meta Platforms bringing workers back to office three times a week

Meta Platforms will soon be requiring certain staffers to report to the office a few days a week for work.

The Information reported Thursday the updated office policy becomes effective early September, and employees will be expected at the office three days a week. Fully remote Meta employees will continue to work from home. 

“We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home,” a Meta spokesperson told FOX Business. 

“We’re also committed to continuously refining our model to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work.”

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Meta Platforms, the corporate parent of social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, joins other companies in the tech industry to make alterations to remote work policies. Twitter, Amazon, Lyft and others have already done so. 

Companies outside tech have also brought back in workers. Disney and some companies in the financial sector are requiring certain workers to work in person.

The Information reported Meta told employees in a message that the in-person work “supports collaboration and the energy that comes from working alongside your team, which are critical as we build the future.”

The average number of days the tech giant’s employees spend in the office weekly now hovers around 2.2, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing an internal memo.

About 2½ months ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta had a theory that “it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively,” something the company was aiming to further study. 

“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,” he explained. “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.”

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During the company’s first-quarter earnings call in early April, Zuckerberg provided an update on the company’s “efficiency work,” which included thousands of job cuts and other measures. He said the company would “focus on improving our distributed work model, delivering AI tools to improve productivity and removing unnecessary processes across the company” for the remainder of the year.

Artificial intelligence and the metaverse, Zuckerberg also said at the time, will continue to be priorities for the company.

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For the first quarter, Meta said its revenue came in at $28.6 billion, a 3% increase from the same three-month-period in 2022. Its net income declined 24%, dropping from $7.5 billion in 2022’s first quarter to $5.7 billion in this year’s first quarter.

Its apps posted an average of 3.02 billion daily active users in March.