Facebook moves to 'desk sharing' for in-office employees as layoffs and cost-cutting continues

• Many Facebook employees will no longer have personal desk space.
• In an effort to reduce spending, the company is "shrinking" its office footprint.

Many Facebook employees will no longer have assigned desk space as the company looks to shrink its office footprint and cut spending.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his Wednesday note to employees regarding the company's mass layoff that, in another effort to reduce spending, Facebook's "real estate footprint" will shrink, meaning offices will close or space will be reduced. As part of the move, employees who have shifted to working mostly remotely since the start of the pandemic will be "transitioning to desk sharing," Zuckerberg said, meaning they will not have assigned workspace.

"We'll roll out more cost-cutting changes like this in the coming months," he added.

As part of Facebook's third-quarter earnings disclosure, the company said it would be spending about $2 billion dollars over the next year to break leases early, on multiple office spaces. The company, which last year changed its name to Meta, did not specify which offices would be closed. Bloomberg reported in October that the company was backing out of one office space in New York. The move comes as Facebook's head of real estate told The Wall Street Journal the company was looking to consolidate and rearrange offices as it continued to allow remote work.

Other cost-cutting measures include an ongoing hiring freeze, now extended indefinitely, and cuts to infrastructure spending. In his Wednesday note, Zuckerberg said he wanted to put Facebook "on a path to achieve a more efficient cost structure than we outlined to investors recently."

In a separate filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook said it was reducing its expense outlook to a range of $94 to $100 billion for the whole of 2023, down from a previous plan of $96 to $101 billion. Most of that reduction will come from cuts to capital expenditures, the company added, with the 2023 spending outlook there reduced to $34 to $37 billion, down from $34 to $39 billion.

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