Meta has announced that employees must come into the office three days a week starting September 5, marking a sharp turn in the pro-remote work culture the company championed during the height of the pandemic.
Workers were issued a notice of the updated policy on Thursday, an employee familiar with the matter told Insider. A Meta spokesperson confirmed in an email to Insider that employees assigned to an office would be mandated to come in three days a week.
In a work notice reviewed by The Information, which first reported on the new return-to-office plans, Meta acknowledged that "firmer in-person expectations will be a shift for some and will require trade offs," but that returning to the office "supports collaboration and the energy that come from working alongside your team, which are critical as we build the future."
Workers who were hired for a remote position in an area where there was no office would not be impacted by the new policy, an employee told Insider.
A Meta spokesperson said the policy would not apply to existing remote workers.
"We're committed to distributed work, and we're confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home. We're also committed to continuously refining our model to foster the collaboration, relationships and culture necessary for employees to do their best work," the spokesperson said.
The return-to-office mandate is a marked shift in tone for Meta, which previously embraced the remote-work culture as company executives, including Zuckerberg, worked across the country and the company announced plans to shrink office space.
In an interview discussing Meta's long-term strategy on "The Tim Ferris Show" last March, Zuckerberg told the podcast that he hoped to have "50% or more of the company" working "distributed and working remotely" by the end of the decade.
Meta's own product, the Metaverse, was supposed to further usher in a new era of virtual-remote-work options.
But this year, amid two rounds of layoffs, the tech company began to indicate that it would be reevaluating its approach to remote work.
In a March memo announcing a layoff of 10,000 employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote how a company analysis showed that "engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week." The details of the analysis were not shared.
"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 wrote.
The company had also begun telling hiring managers around March to halt posting new jobs that offer a remote option, Insider previously reported.
A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the move was "purely temporary" and part of the company's reorganization plans.
