Facebook Will Let Employees Work From Home Until July 2021 (UPDATE)

UPDATE (August 7, 2020): Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook announced this Friday that it will extend its work from home policy for employees through July 2021. The social media network joins other companies like Google — that will also allow employees to work remotely until next summer.

In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Nneka Norville expressed: “Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021. In addition, we are giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs.”

Last March, 48,000 Facebook employees began working remotely since the first wave of stay-at-home regulations. Initially, company announced that its employees would work remotely through the end of 2020.

ORIGINAL STORY (May 22, 2020): In light of social distancing rules amid the coronavirus pandemic, many companies have asked their employees to work from home, among them being three tech giants Twitter, Google and Facebook. While Twitter has announced that it’s looking to allow employees to eventually work from home permanently, the latter two companies have also extended the remote working period until the end of this year. Despite this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now revealed in an interview with The Verge that the company is now planning for half of its entire workforce to work permanently from home in the near future.

In particular, Zuckerberg told The Verge that in an internal company survey, 40 percent of its 48,000-person staff expressed interest in working remotely permanently. In light of this, the company will start offering positions to existing employees to work from home indefinitely later this year, and hopes to have up to half its entire workforce working under that arrangement in the next five to 10 years. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” the CEO said.

The new direction taken by Facebook marks a strong departure from its previous policy, which offered up to $15,000 USD in bonuses to employees who voluntarily relocate closer to the company’s headquarters, hoping the added compensation can offset the increased cost of living. At the same time, a similar policy will exist but in the reverse direction: those who decide to work from home permanently will have their salaries reduced if they move to an area with a lower cost of living. “That means if you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places,” said Zuckerberg.

Elsewhere in tech, Apple’s iPhone 12 is rumored not to include earpods in the box.