Meta is Ready to Fire Employees not Ready to Work From Office

Date: August 22, 2023

Meta has recently shared an email to its employees regarding the Work From Home policy updates mandating 3 days of work from the office.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has finally implemented the long-standing update in work-from-home policy for all its employees who originally worked from the office before the pandemic. It has sent strict communication regarding adherence to the new rules to all its employees on the condition that they will get fired for non-compliance. The new rules require all the originally in-office employees to start working from their office branches at least 3 days a week.

Meta’s Return to Office Policy

Lori Goler, the head of Meta’s Human Resources department, explained the updated Return To Office guidelines to the workforce through the internal communication platform, workplace. She also clarified that all employees hired on a fully remote work basis are exempted from the new updates.

The new rules will be implemented from September 5th onwards, after which multiple compliance failures will lead to disciplinary action and then termination of employment in the end. This means Meta’s in-office employees have less than 3 weeks to prepare for almost full-time in-office work. Lori mentioned that employees must either work from the office or engage in in-person work for at least three days weekly to keep their performance ratings unaffected.

Why the Big Change?

The main reason behind this big update in their in-person time policy is accountability. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is in sync with this thought and strongly feels that in-office interactions will lead to significantly higher productivity for employees and the brand.

A representative of Meta told Business Insider, “As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed. We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves."

He added, “In the near term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we're being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work.”

The company introduced the policy changes in June but has taken strict action now as it seems to be high time for people to go back to the original form of work from the office. Even Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk has sent multiple warning Emails to his employees to comply with a minimum of 40 hours of in-office work, which equate to 8 hours over 5 days per week. However, most of the big tech companies have kept a hybrid nature in their work policies to slowly return to their original nature while ensuring the comfort of their workforce.