Mark Zuckerberg sees 50% of Facebook employees working remotely in 5 to 10 years
Stories, thoughts and insights on people, culture and startups.
We have been covering remote work extensively over the past months. Like it or not, there are a vast amount of implications and learnings to be made. Our focus revolved mostly around small-mid scale businesses presenting their approaches and frameworks to help other companies best implement this model.
Most of the companies we observed like Gitlab, InVision, Zapier, Basecamp, Doist (and the list goes on), have adopted a remote model from day one. But when you see the CEO of a company with 40,000+ employees and 85 offices around the globe talking about bringing their workforce “mostly” remote over the coming years, you start to put things into perspective even further.
This week Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg live streamed their internal weekly company townhall publicly. He talked about what FB learned so far while running with nearly 95% of their workforce operating remotely and what they’re planning on doing next. You can watch the full video below – 1h long but worth it (imo!).
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10111936118050541/
Like many companies, FB is planning to open up offices gradually (at 25% capacity to start with) keeping the majority of people working remotely. Unlikely many companies though, they intend to take some big steps to be the most forward leading remote company at their scale. Zuckerberg predicts to have ~50% of FB’s employees working remotely in 5 to 10 years. WOW!
Here is a summary of the benefits Zuckerberg highlighted:
Aggressively opening up remote hiring, offering permanent remote work for existing employees, and slowly adapting their culture are some of the measures they’re implementing. These initiatives will positively impact the following:
The pool of talent they can tap into, enabling FB to access people that wouldn’t have otherwise considered the company because not incline to relocate to one of their offices;
Improve retention of existing employees (really important as these people – unlike the new hires – won’t need ramp up time to be effective) considering to leave the business because they wish to change their life style and moving away from large metropolis/tech hubs;
Improve diversity by accessing talent from communities they couldn’t have otherwise reached;
Spread economic opportunities around the world and facilitate more broad based economic prosperity and better social and political climate;
Have a positive impact on the environment because of the reduced commute (during Covid-19 we’re experiencing 17% less emission);
There are all interesting aspects, and a good portion of them can be applied to startups as well – we covered some in more details in our Remote vs Distribute Workforce write up.
Zuckerberg also touched on the innovation aspects related to the Future of Work technologies Facebook is working on. A remote workforce would enable them to “eat their own dog food” and further advance some of their technology innovations. Facebook at Work and Oculus for businesses for two examples.
More here → about.fb.com/news/2020/05/the-future-of-work
Here are a few more interesting findings from last week
Post COVID-19, Coinbase will be a remote-first company
CEO Brian Armstrong sent a note to Coinbase’s employees outlining how the company will be operating post Covid-19What Defines Places Where Developers Thrive?
The developer “culture test”What would work look like if we built it from the ground up today?
An Open Source platform to democratise ideation and concepts for what's next in the Future of Work.
I hope you enjoyed reading, and if you have thoughts or feedback you can reach me on Twitter.
Have a wonderful Sunday,
Giovanni
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