According to Mark Zuckerberg, the founding CEO and co-founder of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, internal data analysis suggests that engineers who joined the company in an in-person capacity performed better than those who joined remotely from the beginning. Further, he stated that younger engineers, or more specifically those who are “earlier in their career,” perform better when they spend at least three days per week in person with colleagues they work with daily.
This insight stems from a memo sent to Facebook employees earlier today, in which Zuckerberg stated that the company was cutting another 10,000 jobs due to the restructuring. In addition to announcing the new round of layoffs, Zuckerberg also discussed several ways the company was looking to improve its efficiency, such as canceling “lower priority projects” and creating a flatter organizational structure by removing various layers of management. We should take note of the fact that Meta is aligning performance and remote working data. It tells us a little about how the powers at Facebook Towers are currently evaluating remote working in general, with Zuckerberg stating that in-person time is crucial for building relationships and achieving more tasks.
There is no doubt that remote work is one of the legacies of the global pandemic – Meta has been forced to embrace it faster than it would have if it had not been for the pandemic. It was in May 2020 that Zuckerberg announced that Meta (then called Facebook) would be one of the most forward-looking companies on remote work at our scale, and to this day, Meta’s careers page highlights its mission to create a world that is distributed first. Meta would make little sense to abandon its recent move to embrace remote work, especially given that it is actively shrinking its real estate footprint while doubling its metaverse ambitions, which would undoubtedly benefit from a more distributed workforce. Thus, it would make little sense for Meta to abandon its recent move to embrace remote work. Meta is trying to get people back into the office more often to get everyone back to work.
Zuckerberg contended that engineers who started at Meta in a fully in-person capacity before transitioning to a small role and those who stayed in a fully in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely, based on an analysis of early internal performance data. Zuckerberg said that this analysis also found that engineers at the beginning of their careers perform better on average when they work at least three days a week in person with their teammates. There is still a lot to learn about this, but we hypothesize that building trust in the person is still easier and that those relationships make us more productive when we work together.
It is not all that absurd to suggest that people new to a particular job might benefit from being around their colleagues, especially inexperienced new starters who are completely new to the working world and have no idea what they are doing. The issue is that companies will have to tread lightly around the issue at a time when remote work is a major selling point for in-demand technical talent that is in high demand. Additionally, there could be a broader issue regarding how companies manage their remote workforce and how they work the processes involved. Suppose Meta’s size and global distribution make it more difficult for the company to transition, as opposed to a company that has grown organically from the ground up as a small company. In that case, it may be more challenging for Meta to transition.
In any case, Meta has yet to make any immediate demands, but that could change as other tech giants reevaluate their approach to remote working and other tech companies rethink their path to the subject. At the moment, however, Zuckerberg gently encourages people to work with colleagues in person more often if they can. Zuckerberg said that the company is committed to the idea of distributed work. Consequently, we are committed to continuously refining our model to be as effective and efficient as possible for this to work. It is a part of our ‘year of efficiency’ that we seek to thoroughly understand this topic and locate ways to help people make the connections necessary for them to work effectively as part of our ‘year of efficiency.’ While we wait for more opportunities to work in person with your colleagues, I encourage you to find as many opportunities as possible to work with them.
