Meta’s return-to-office edict is here: employees back to work

Meta’s mandate for employees to return to the office for a minimum of three days a week went into affect on Tuesday — a reversal from the tech giant’s remote work policies that were introduced during the coronavirus pandemic.

In June, Meta informed its workers that their presence will be required at the office for three days a week beginning in September.

“We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday.

“In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we’re being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work.”

Weeks before Meta’s new policy went into affect, the company warned employees who flout the mandate that they risk termination.

“Accountability will be central to making this [policy] fair and effective,” Meta’s Head of People Lori Goler wrote in a memo to employees.

Goler wrote that managers will have to review employee attendance records on a monthly basis.

“As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed,” she wrote.

The shift in policy comes after Facebook’s parent company allowed all full-time employees to work remotely during the throes of the COVID pandemic.

At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed the remote work policy, stating that “good work can get done anywhere, and I’m even more optimistic that remote work at scale is possible, particularly as remote video presence and virtual reality continue to improve.”

Zuckerberg sounded a different tune in March of this year, when he wrote in a blog post: “Engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.”

The end of the pandemic prompted companies in tech as well as finance and other sectors to begin the process of calling their employees back to the office.

Companies that initially embraced remote work such as Apple, Amazon and Google have also reversed course and have mandated workers to return to their desks — mostly three days a week.

On Wall Street, firms such as Goldman Sachs want employees back in the office five days a week.