OAKLAND, Calif. -- Facebook said Thursday that it would allow many employees to work from home permanently. But there's a catch: They may not be able to keep their big Silicon Valley salaries in more affordable parts of the country.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, told workers during a staff meeting that was livestreamed on his Facebook page that within a decade as many as half of the company's more than 48,000 employees would work from home.
"It's clear that covid has changed a lot about our lives, and that certainly includes the way that most of us work," Zuckerberg said. "Coming out of this period, I expect that remote work is going to be a growing trend as well."
Facebook's decision, the first among tech's biggest companies, is a stark change for a business culture built around getting workers into giant offices and keeping them there. Using free shuttle buses, free cafeterias and personal services like dry cleaning, tech companies have done as much as possible over the years to give employees little reason to go home, let alone avoid the office.
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If other giant companies follow suit, tech employment could start to shift away from expensive hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle and New York. The option to work from home could also provide more reason for tech workers who complain that their enviable salaries still aren't enough to buy a home in San Francisco or San Jose to consider settling in other parts of the country.
Zuckerberg's announcement followed similar decisions at Twitter and the payments company Square, both led by Jack Dorsey. Dorsey said last week that employees at his companies would be allowed to work from home indefinitely. At Google, employees have been told they can work from home through the end of the year, but the company has not made any indications about permanent plans.
There are signs that remote work is popular among technologists. After Dorsey's announcement, Google searches for "Twitter jobs" soared, according to Google Trends.
Aaron Levie, chief executive of the business technology company Box, wrote on Twitter that "the push happening around remote work is as game-changing for the future of tech as the launch of the iPhone" more than a decade ago.
Tech executives have long believed that person-to-person communication was a big part of the creativity that went into generating popular products. They built giant campuses that reflected that belief, from the ornate offices of Apple, Google and Facebook in Silicon Valley to the new Amazon headquarters in Seattle.
Still, the biggest tech companies were trying to expand beyond their main offices before the pandemic, as an older generation of companies like Intel had done. Amazon, for example, intends to open a second headquarters in Virginia. The coronavirus pandemic could accelerate those plans.
"Before the virus happened, a lot of the discussion about the tech sector was about how to bring people to work sites and create affordable housing," said Robert Silverman, a professor of urban and regional planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "This is kind of a natural progression."
An employee exodus from the biggest urban tech hubs, combined with layoffs, could have dramatic local effects. Housing costs in the Bay Area, for example, have fallen since the pandemic began, according to the rental firm Zumper. Rents in San Francisco fell 7% in April, and were down 15% in Menlo Park, Facebook's home.
Facebook will begin by allowing new hires who are senior engineers to work remotely, and then allow current employees to apply for permission to work from home if they have positive performance reviews.
Starting in January, Facebook's employee compensation will be adjusted based on the cost of living in the locations where workers choose to live. The company plans to make sure employees are honest about their location by checking from where they log into internal systems.
Zuckerberg said the shift could offer more benefits than inconveniences for the company. Allowing remote work will allow Facebook to broaden its recruitment, retain valuable employees, reduce the climate impact caused by commutes and expand the diversity of its work force, he said.
Business on 05/23/2020