Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that the social media giant will begin allowing many of its 50,000 employees and new recruits to work from home on a permanent basis, adding to a small but growing number of companies in the field. Technology that adopted a decentralized activity during the coronavirus pandemic, informs NBC News and Reuters, quoted by Agerpres.
He anticipates that in the next five to ten years, about 50 percent of Facebook’s workforce will work remotely. This would mean a significant change in the concentration of staff that could radically change the way the company operates.
This process will begin with “an aggressive opening of distance recruitment” – first in the United States, then outside them – beyond the urban centers where Facebook has offices.
“I don’t think it’s too good to limit employment to people living around offices,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook will also allow existing employees to apply to work remotely. Those who have demonstrated good performance and are able to work remotely can be allowed to do so permanently. Facebook has already said that the vast majority of staff can work from home by the end of this year.
The Facebook announcement, which Zuckerberg sent to employees in a company-level Q&A (questions and answers) session on Thursday, comes after Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter and mobile payment company Square, announced that employees at both companies could work remotely from now on. Canadian e-commerce company Shopify announced a similar move on Thursday.
Even though this process is expected to be gradual on Facebook, the measure marks a seismic change for Silicon Valley and American business in general, especially if other companies are inspired to follow suit, NBC News reports.
Recent research by the University of Chicago has estimated that 37% of jobs in the United States can be done from home. However, the number is higher in areas such as Silicon Valley (51 percent) and San Francisco (45 percent). But only 2 percent of the American workforce works from home on a regular basis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University who has done extensive research on decentralized work, said he anticipates that these numbers will more than double after the pandemic. This will have major implications for employees, companies and even American cities.
Bloom cited a study that shows that employee productivity increases by 13 percent when people work from home, even when other factors, such as creativity, decrease.
In January, Zuckerberg predicted that the company would receive “augmented reality glasses” that would give people “the opportunity to be ‘present’ anywhere.”
“Today, many people feel the need to move to cities because there are jobs. But there is not enough housing in many cities, so housing costs rise as the quality of life falls,” the Facebook chief wrote on 9 January in a post on the social network. “Imagine if you could live wherever you choose and access any job anywhere else. If we complete what we are building, this should be much closer to reality by 2030.”
