Tens of thousands of Facebook employees had been working from home for just two months when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction: in a few years, half of the company’s employees would not regularly come into the office.

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“I think we could have 50 per cent of our people working remotely,” Zuckerberg said in May 2020, talking up the advantages of staff not being chained to a desk, such as more diverse hiring and less pollution.

“There are some very clear benefits to remote work,” he added.

Two years later, Zuckerberg has appeared to alter his stance.

As he announced a brutal round of layoffs earlier this year at Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., Zuckerberg suggested that staff did a better job when in the office — at least early in their career.

“Engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he said.

“Our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in-person.”

Although he said Meta remained committed to “distributed work,” the statement marked a shift in thinking that has been mirrored across the tech industry: employees are wanted back at their desks.

Andy Jassy, Amazon.com Inc.’s chief executive, has ordered staff to be back in the office a minimum of three days a week from next month, following Apple Inc., which made the move in September. At Twitter, Elon Musk has largely reversed a policy allowing staff to be fully remote, to the extent that some have been sleeping at the office.

The diktats contrast with the early days of the pandemic, when Big Tech was at the vanguard of what was then seen as a long-term revolution in how people work. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Twitter and Facebook were among the first employers to send people home in early March 2020, when registered COVID-19 cases in the United States were in the hundreds.

The young, tech-savvy workforces easily adapted to replacing human contacts with video calls and instant messaging services, some of which they had developed. Increased demand for digital tools, streaming services and social media meant big tech companies were forced to hire thousands of new staff without an office induction.

Share prices boomed, making employees rich, and many found they could live like kings outside of the expensive tech hubs they had previously had to inhabit. After a few weeks, Twitter said staff would be able to work from home permanently.

At Apple, chief executive Tim Cook hailed staff’s efforts after a crop of newly released products led to record sales. “There are worse things for a company whose business is innovation than having to periodically do just about everything in an entirely new way,” he told investors.

Zuckerberg laid out the broadest vision, saying he personally planned to spend half of 2021 and 2022 working from home and that anyone who wished to move abroad would be supported.

Companies made half-hearted moves to bring staff back into the office as vaccines became widely available, but the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants gave them an excuse to push back reopening.

Office mandates are never going to work

Marc Benioff

As late as last summer, working from home looked like a permanent trend. Last June, office occupancy in the tech hub of San Francisco was just 32 per cent according to Kastle, a security firm. “Office mandates are never going to work,” said Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce Inc., the city’s largest private employer.

When guidance was brought in, it was loosely enforced, especially in satellite offices. Staff at Facebook and Google’s U.K. offices say that for much of last year they effectively had a free vote on whether to come into work.

Workers who were asked to go back protested, pointing out that they had options elsewhere: companies such as Coinbase Global Inc., Dropbox Inc. and Airbnb Inc. all said they would allow remote work permanently.

In August, Apple employees petitioned against Cook’s order announcing that staff would have to be back three days a week. In February, contractors working for YouTube announced plans to strike in protest at return to office plans; an earlier strike by Google Maps workers had secured a delay to office returns.

However, a brutal tech downturn has changed the picture. Since the start of the year, Microsoft Corp., Google, Meta and Amazon have laid off thousands of workers as rising interest rates hit their share prices.

Financial pressures have made tech bosses more conscious of the multibillion-dollar investments they have made in their currently under-occupied headquarters, such as Apple’s spaceship-like Silicon Valley base and Meta’s Frank Gehry-designed campus. It has also shifted power from employee to employer.

“Tech firms are downsizing, and they’re going to target first for downsizing the people who will not come into the office,” says Thomas Roulet, an associate professor in organization theory at Cambridge University, who studies home-working policies.

Things are even changing at Meta, where Zuckerberg spent part of the last year working from Hawaii and where executives are distributed around the world (Sir Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri are London-based, while Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, resides in Los Angeles).

Last week, the company stopped advertising entirely remote jobs, although a spokesman said the move was temporary.

The shift has been happening across the tech industry. According to figures from jobs website Adzuna, the number of tech jobs in Britain advertised as fully remote has fallen from 39 per cent in April last year to 27 per cent last month. Hybrid jobs, which involve a mix of office and home work, have risen from 20 per cent to 29 per cen, while office-based roles have climbed from 7.7 per cent to 9.1 per cent (the remainder are adverts that do not specify). The change is similar in the United States, although more roles are advertised as fully remote.

Last year, Cook called working from home “the mother of all experiments.”

That experiment now seems to be ending.

The Daily Telegraph