Evan Spiegel, CEO of U.S. social media company Snap, informed employees in a memo on Monday that they are expected to return to the office four days a week starting next February.
Spiegel wrote: “I believe that spending more time face-to-face will help us reach our full potential.” That means full-time employees will spend more than four days a week in the office on average, he said, while certain work-related tasks, such as meeting with clients, could count as office time.
Spiegel went on to write in the memo, “While each of us may be sacrificing in terms of individual convenience, I believe we will reap more in terms of collective success.”
Throughout much of the second half of the year, Snap scaled back and shelved some projects to cut costs. in August, the company laid off 20 percent of its workforce and cut programs that were not helping to grow revenue and drive the company’s augmented reality (AR) technology. The company also failed to increase revenue as quickly as expected as customers cut advertising budgets.
With the easing of epidemic restrictions, Snap is the latest company to formally ask employees to return to the office. Earlier, Apple asked employees to work three days a week starting in September.
Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, insists that employees work in the office, even though the company previously told employees they could “always telecommute” from anywhere. Many of Wall Street’s biggest banks have already eliminated their work-from-home policies.
For Snap, the new return-to-work policy will apply to all employees in 30 offices worldwide. The company is also working on a process for special cases of employees who request to telecommute.
We’ve worked this way for so long that I worry we’ve forgotten the benefits of face-to-face communication,” said Spiegel. I believe the new policy while retaining flexibility for our team members, will help us accelerate our growth and achieve our strategic priorities of growing our community, re-blocking our revenue growth, and leading in AR.”
