Facebook has announced that it would now allow its employees to work from home remotely even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, joining the leagues of other tech giants who are offering an option to work remotely forever.? ?
This announcement was made by Brynn Harrington, vice president of Facebook¡¯s HR team in a conversation with BBC. She expressed that even though the earlier deadline for remote working was until June 2021, she¡¯s seen some employees really thrive working at home.?
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She said, "For example, parents who are closer to their children and are happy to cut their commute time and optimize their workday, they're thrilled to work from home."?
Brynn announced that Facebook employees could now apply to their managers in case they wish to permanently remote work.?
She added, ¡°Obviously this is working from home during a pandemic, we are not in a period of healthy remote work. We have people juggling caregiving responsibilities, we have people living in small apartments with roommates, those people desperately want to get back into offices, and we're working really hard to do that, as soon as it's safe to open our offices."?
Facebook is working on reopening its offices in San Francisco at a 10 percent capacity in May, as revealed in a Bloomberg report where workers will be required to wear face masks, maintain social distancing and possibly even get tested weekly for the virus.?
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Zuckerberg in May 2020 had revealed he was prepared for 50 percent of his company¡¯s workforce to work remotely within the next decade.Facebook isn¡¯t the only company, however, to offer remote working to its employees. Twitter was one of the first companies to announce work from home forever.?Even Spotify this year announced that it will allow its employees to work from anywhere.
However, some are still not quite convinced with this idea.?Microsoft's Satya Nadella has been quite vocal about how he's not supportive of the work from home culture. Even Google revealed that it's working on applying a hybrid working model where people would be given the ability to work from home for most days during the week -- especially those who have to commute for hours every day.?
Microsoft in October announced that it¡¯ll offer its employees choice to either work from home or their office. However, this had a condition that they could only remotely work for less than half of their average work hours and in case they wanted to work longer, they¡¯d have to get their manager¡¯s approval.?