Meta Execs Are Staying a Long Way From the Office

If Mark Zuckerberg and other top Meta execs were rank-and-file workers, they might get accused of taking the company's work-from-home policy a little too far. They have scattered far from Meta's Silicon Valley headquarters, with Zuckerberg spending a lot of time in Hawaii, Instagram head Adam Mosseri working from multiple locations including Hawaii and Cape Cod, and others relocating to countries including the UK and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meta said last year that full-time employees whose roles allow it are welcome to apply to work from home. Others are expected to return on March 28.

Having a leadership team spread out around the world is unusual but some analysts say it could work well Meta, which changed its name from Facebook Inc. in October and has been working to develop products that make it easier to work from home. "If you’re trying to develop the metaverse and develop workplace systems, learning by doing is probably not a bad way to do it," Stephen Lee at Logan Capital tells the Journal. David Heger, an analyst at Edward Jones, disagrees. He says that having execs spread out across many time zones could make it harder for Meta to deal with the many issues it is facing.

Meta shares plunged more than 20% last month and have not recovered. "Considering the juncture that the company’s at right at the moment, it may not be the ideal time to be experimenting with your top managers working remotely," Heger says. Axios notes that while execs at Facebook are putting a lot of distance between themselves and the office, leaders at other companies are more enthusiastic than rank-and-file workers about returning to the office. According to a Slack Future Forum report, 75% of execs want to return to the office three days a week or more, compared to just 37% of other employees. (Meta employees have been complaining about the loss of perks like laundry service.)