Facebook: OOO and WFH

Facebook plans to “overhaul its working practices”, says Hannah Murphy in the Financial Times. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) has told staff that the 45,000-strong company is “opening up remote hiring”, with the aim of getting half of its staff to work remotely in the next five to ten years. That would save on office costs and allow Facebook to reduce salaries for those working from lower-cost areas and help it ditch the $15,000 moving bonus it pays to new hires.

Facebook isn’t the only company enthusiastic about remote working, says Tae Kim on Bloomberg. Twitter and Shopify are fans too. But the CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software predicts that “sustained strong productivity will get more difficult the longer people are forced to work from home”. Microsoft’s CEO thinks that “managing and mentoring employees” will be difficult.

Still, even if Facebook retains its offices, it hopes to profit from the boom in remote working in other ways, says Richard Speed on The Register. Zuckerberg says that paid membership of Facebook’s Workplace platform (its equivalent of Zoom) had increased from three to five million. It is even hoping that virtual reality (VR) could help people collaborate from home, which would be good news for Facebook’s VR division Oculus. 

However, for now Facebook’s efforts lag far behind both Zoom, which claims to have 300 million daily users, and Microsoft, whose collaboration tool Microsoft Teams has 75 million.