Mark Zuckerberg plans to spend at least half of next year working from home, and he is also giving more Facebook employees the option of working remotely.
“I’ve found that working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” the social media company’s co-founder wrote Wednesday in a memo obtained by multiple media outlets.
Facebook told employees in a separate memo that “anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work.” Zuckerberg, 37, is taking the lead with plans to avoid the office for at least six months in 2022.
The chief executive had previously hinted at a plan in May to let many employees permanently work from home. During a staff meeting that was live-streamed on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said he expected nearly half of the company’s more than 60,000 workers to work remotely within a decade.
“It’s clear that COVID has changed a lot about our lives, and that certainly includes the way that most of us work,” Zuckerberg said. “Coming out of this period, I expect that remote work is going to be a growing trend as well.”
That timeline has now moved up, just as California plans to lift nearly all pandemic restrictions on Tuesday, with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies firming up office reopening plans. Apple and Google this week said that they expected at least three days of in-person work to become standard in the fall.
Zuckerberg said he instead plans time at his estate in Hawaii on Kauai’s North Shore, where according to a pair of videos posted to his Facebook page earlier this week, he has been practicing his weaponry skills.
In the first clip, posted Sunday, the CEO filmed himself shooting bowling pins with a bow and arrow. In the second video, which plays in very slow motion to an Audioslave song, Zuckerberg wears noise-canceling headphones as he flings two spears at a wooden target. He captioned the latter video, “I have a very particular set of skills…,” a nod to Liam Neeson’s character in “Taken.”
Zuckerberg explains his new hobbies in a separate post, saying, “A trail I wanted to hike is out of hiking permits, but has plenty of hunting permits available. That’s basically saying: look, you can’t walk here unless you also bring a bow and arrow. So I guess we’re doing this.”
Facebook has been one of tech’s biggest winners during the pandemic, with 2020 net income jumping to $29.1 billion, a 58% increase from the prior year.
Unlike smaller tech companies that have cut office space and marketed sublease space, Facebook hasn’t reduced any of its Bay Area real estate despite remote work expansion plans. The company has new offices opening this year in Burlingame for its Oculus virtual reality division and in Sunnyvale. It expanded last year in Fremont. Last August, Facebook leased 730,000 square feet in Manhattan near Penn Station.
Facebook still plans to open its offices at full capacity in October, according to the memo. Employees who are not granted permission to work from home will be required to come in half the time. The offer is not available to subcontractors, many of whom in an open letter to Zuckerberg claimed they were forced back into the office in November.
Aidin Vaziri is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
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