- Early-career engineers tend to do better when they show up in person, Mark Zuckerberg said.
- He cited Meta's "early analysis of performance data," but acknowledged it "requires further study."
Meta's "year of efficiency" could have employees spending more time in the office.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the company would be laying off 10,000 more employees this year, and he also floated the idea of engineers potentially working in person more often. The company had looked through "performance data," he wrote, and found that engineers who joined Meta in person or stayed in person performed better than those who joined and continued to work remotely.
Meta's review also found that early-career engineers benefited from working in person "with teammates at least three days a week," Zuckerberg wrote, echoing business leaders who have pushed the idea of in-person collaboration and serendipitous interactions, as well as the idea that in-office work can preserve culture and productivity.
"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.
A representative for Meta declined to comment beyond Zuckerberg's post, which didn't articulate any formal return-to-office policy or any timeline for such a move.
Meta's current policy includes both remote and in-person work. Full-time employees who can accomplish their work remotely can apply to do so, while others have to go into the office, Insider previously reported.
Meta's website references options for remote roles: "We believe that what you can do matters more than where you are, whether you work from home or in our offices."
Big tech leaders who've called workers back to the office include Marc Benioff of Salesforce, which has a policy requiring certain non-remote employees to be in the office three times a week, as Insider has previously reported. Elon Musk also ended remote work at Twitter when he took over at the social media platform last year.
Billionaire Thomas Siebel, the CEO of software company C3.ai, told Insider this week about his company's own in-office culture, taking a dig at remote work. "If you want to work from home, like four days of work in your pajamas, go to work for Facebook," he said.
Meta previously announced the layoffs of some 11,000 employees in November.