New Delhi: A day after social media behemoth Facebook announced a permanent system of remote work, outside its Menlo Park headquarters in Silicon Valley, employees’ dreams of taking home the same paycheck were dashed.
Facebook said Friday that while employees could work remotely, their paychecks would be modified to reflect local costs of living. The tech giant would earlier give new employees a bonus to live near the Menlo Park area.
Addressing employees in a publicly broadcast livestream on his Facebook page, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said employees have to update the company on their new locations by 1 January 2021, so that their salaries could be adjusted accordingly. He added that employees who attempt to sidestep these modified compensation adjustments will be subject to severe ramifications as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.
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Monitoring employees
Zuckerberg said that Facebook will monitor its employees’ locations by checking where they access its VPN. Facebook also uses its own apps to track employee locations, and has done so in the past to track interns who didn’t report for work.
The move to embrace remote working however will not imply layoffs for those in California. “Company is not planning layoffs or compulsory moves or salary adjustments for employees who opt to stay in the Bay Area,” a Facebook spokesperson said to Reuters.
The remote work compensation guidelines come in the wake of Zuckerberg’s announcement Thursday that Facebook would be “aggressively opening up remote hiring” in July, expecting that about half its workforce would eventually do their jobs outside Facebook’s offices over the next five to 10 years.
The move is geared towards reimagining workplaces in a post-Covid world, and Facebook is not the only one. Earlier, microblogging site Twitter and financial services company Square had also announced that employees will be allowed to work from home permanently should they prefer to.