Facebook makes some important announcements for its employees in case of remote-working policy implementation

CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that due to the current trend, there is a chance that 50 percent of its employees will be working from home within the next 5 to 10 years.

If the company starts implementing the policy of full-time remote working, the employees will have to notify the company if they shift to another location by 1st January 2021. Their salaries are going to be adjusted according to their new locations, as that will be necessary for accounts and taxes. Zuckerberg has also announced that serious legal steps will be taken if employees fail to produce honest evidence of their location and work.

Apart from the existing employees, the company is going to hire more people for remote jobs. This will pave the way for people who live in different cities and previously could not apply for jobs because they could not move or relocate. Now, they will get a chance to apply as remote workers too. In a way, this will help Facebook with employee retention and improve the diversity of its workforce, while giving more economic opportunities than before.

Due to the current situation of the coronavirus pandemic, approximately 95% of Facebook employees are working from home. According to a survey, 50% of these employees feel that their productivity has not been affected, and their workflow is the same as before when they used to work from their office before the pandemic hit the world.

40% of the employees said that they were interested in full-time remote work, and amongst these 40 percent of people, 75% of them are willing to relocate if they could work remotely.

However, Zuckerberg has also said that Facebook will allow existing employees to apply for remote work policy if they show strong recent performance. There will be a specific criterion that these employees will have to meet to be given a chance to work from home as a full-time employee. They should be on teams that support remote work, and they should get approval from their group leaders. Recent graduates will not be eligible to apply for this policy.

Keeping this new possibility into consideration, Facebook has also announced new features to roll out for its Slack-like chat tool, Workplace, which will allow video conferencing in Workplace Rooms, the usage of Portal TV during Live video calls and automatic audio captioning in six languages during these live video calls.

These new features will set a solid base for the upcoming days where remote working will become the new norm.

Facebook is not the only app that has come to this solution. Recently Twitter made this announcement that it will allow its employees to work from home in the future if they desire. Following the suit, Shopify, Square, Spotify and Coinbase have also announced the same thing.

Surprisingly, when most of the market is down, Facebook’s share price saw a surge of 1% after Zuckerberg’s announcements.

This clearly shows the trend towards which everyone is leaning now.



Read next: A fresh set of guidelines regarding music copyrights by Facebook and its implications

Featured Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
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