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In an internal meeting with staff on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is planning to shift the majority of its workforce to be able to work remotely in the next 5-10 years.
Why it matters: The coronavirus pandemic has forced many companies to quickly adopt remote working strategies. Tech companies, which are well-equipped for remote work, are preparing to make remote work the new normal for most of their employees.
Zuckerberg told Axios: "My prediction is that in 5-10 years we could have ~50% working remote. That's not a target, just a prediction based on the demand we've seen so far."
- "The first steps will be aggressively opening up remote hiring around the whole US and Canada, especially for experienced engineers, as well as letting some employees request to become permanent remote workers."
Details: In an interview with NBC, Zuckerberg said it "doesn't seem that good to constrain hiring to people who live around offices."
- Zuckerberg says that the company plans to unlocking remote hiring immediately. In the past, Zuckerberg had implied that working in or near a Facebook office was important towards maintaining a strong workplace culture. Now, that idea seems less feasible and less necessary, given that the company continues to perform well despite more people working remotely.
Be smart: Facebook has already said that people can work remotely through the end of 2020 if they choose. It was one of the first companies to tell employees to start working from home, if possible, in the first place. It's already said that non-essential corporate travel is cancelled until 2021.
The big picture: More remote work will be a major trend coming out of the coronavirus. Big companies like Facebook will pioneer that trend.
- Twitter and Square, both run by Jack Dorsey, announced last week that people could work from home indefinitely if they wanted to.
Go deeper: Many tech workers won't go back to offices after coronavirus crisis