Mark Zuckerberg plans to shift Facebook Inc. FB +0.92% toward a substantially remote workforce over the next decade, permanently reconfiguring the tech giant’s operations around the dispersed structure that the coronavirus pandemic forced on it.
The plan, which the Facebook chief executive outlined to employees on Thursday, is one of the highest-profile examples of business leaders committing to extend the practices their companies quickly embraced to adjust to the crisis. On matters from workplace to strategy, managers are rethinking what works and shifting course, sometimes long term.
The remote-work changes for new hires will roll out initially in the U.S. and apply only to senior engineers at first. With individual team leaders’ approval, new recruits will be offered the choice to work from home, and current employees around the world with strong performance reviews will be able to apply to do so. In time, the policy will be extended to employees outside Facebook’s engineering department.
Within 10 years, Mr. Zuckerberg expects, as much as half of Facebook’s employees—who currently number more than 45,000—to work from home, he said in an interview before the announcement.
Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook is moving gradually because the shift will require new techniques and tools to compensate for the loss of in-person office interactions—a challenge for which he said the company is well-positioned given its focus on using technology to connect people.
“This is about how we do better work and attract the people we need to do the best work we can,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. Facebook’s ability to keep working amid abrupt restrictions brought on by the pandemic gave him confidence in the remote working model, he said.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan sets Facebook on a course for a long-term change at a time when companies across industries are rethinking how they function amid pandemic-induced remote-work requirements.
Plans for returning to the office differ widely—even within Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Facebook’s much smaller rival Twitter Inc., recently told employees they could work from home indefinitely. San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. on Wednesday said it also would remain “remote-first” after coronavirus restrictions are lifted, and e-commerce company Shopify Inc. said Thursday that most of its employees will work remotely in the future.
Other tech leaders are less sanguine about staffers staying home. Elon Musk, faced with an unusual challenge in Silicon Valley because his company runs its own factory, waged a public battle with local authorities this month to reopen Tesla Inc.’s manufacturing plant near San Francisco so the electric-car company could start churning out vehicles again.
Evan Spiegel, CEO of messaging company Snap Inc., has joked with his team that he wants to work from home forever because he feels more productive and fulfilled being able to spend so much time with his family, according to a person familiar with his thinking. But he has also said that he thinks the idea of knowledge workers working from home indefinitely is dystopian, and expressed concern that some have found it miserable.
Snap executives met to begin preparing their return-to-work plans when the shutdown started in March, the person said. They are trying to set up a system that would allow employees who want to get back to the office to do so as soon as it’s safe and legal, while providing flexible options for people who have child-care challenges or who worry about returning for health reasons, this person said.
Remote work is in some ways easier for tech companies, with their largely white-collar, tech-savvy workforces. But it also presents challenges, such as finding ways to replicate the directness and serendipity of in-person interactions that are often seen as key to innovation.