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Mark Zuckerberg doesn't favour working from home; says 'easier to build trust in person'

Asks employees to find more opportunities to work with colleagues in person

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In an e-mail to Meta employees, which he also shared on his blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the company's future and put forward his thoughts on working from home.

"Our efficiency work has several parallel workstreams to improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more," he wrote.

He said over the next couple of months, leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening the organisations, canceling low priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.

In the mail, he also announced the decision to lay off 10,000 employees. With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May....Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired."

He said although the decision is tough, there is "no way around it."

"After restructuring, we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group. Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model. We also aim to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year."

"In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster," he wrote.
He said the company is also focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles. "It’s important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible. We will make sure we continue to meet all our critical and legal obligations as we find ways to operate more efficiently."

On the topic of working from home, he said the company is committed to "distributed work."That means we’re also committed to continuously refining our model to make this work as effectively as possible."

Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely, he said.

"This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. 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."

He said the company is finding ways to make sure people build the necessary connections to work effectively, adding, "In the meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person."

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