Facebook set a date for reopening the Bay Area office: May 10.
The social media giant will open with 10% capacity starting at its headquarters in Menlo Park, as long as health data continues to improve. Its Fremont offices are scheduled to reopen on May 17, Sunnyvale on May 24 and its two towers in downtown San Francisco on June 7.
Employees were allowed to work from home until July 2 and will now be able to remain remote for up to a month after the offices reach 50% capacity. That will likely be after Sept. 7 for major sites, Facebook said.
Facebook is also reopening offices in Seattle in April and also in the process of reopening in Asia.
The company will eliminate some of its main advantages for health reasons: there will be no free food or buses to take workers to campus. There is no timetable for when they will return.
“When we return to the office, we have a series of protocols in place that include testing, physical distance, wearing masks and other best practices. We continue to work with experts to ensure that our plans to return to the office prioritize the health and safety of everyone, ”said Chloe Meyere, a Facebook spokeswoman.
The company will not require employees to be vaccinated to return to the offices.
The absence of meals at the office can help local restaurants and stores to recover. In San Francisco, Facebook rents all office space in 181 Fremont, an important center of its Instagram division, and close to the Park Tower in the Transbay neighborhood. It has 1.2 million square feet, enough space in pre-pandemic times for more than 5,000 workers.
The area, along with the rest of the city center, was devastated during the pandemic.
Facebook is also hiring some totally remote employees, as some of the pandemic disruptions become permanent. The broader recruiting area will also help fuel its voracious growth: the company had 58,604 global employees at the end of 2020, an increase of 30% in one year.
“I think Facebook will be the most forward-looking company in remote work on our scale, and we are working on a careful and responsible plan to do this,” wrote Zuckerberg last May. “This allows us to access talent pools outside of traditional technology centers in large cities – and it should help spread economic opportunities much more widely across the country and around the world, while helping us to build a more diverse company.”
He said that half of the company’s workers could be remote within a decade.
Facebook is one of the first large Bay Area companies to announce plans to reopen after San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have moved to the state’s orange level, allowing non-essential offices to reopen. San Francisco is restricting office space to 25% of capacity.
SAP, the German software company, plans to reopen offices in the coming weeks, reported the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Bret Taylor, president of Salesforce, said the company will reopen offices “soon” during a lecture on the Clubhouse app on Thursday. A spokeswoman for Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, said there is currently no deadline.
Wells Fargo said most workers would remain at home until at least May 1.
Facebook was one of the technology’s biggest winners during the pandemic, with net revenue from 2020 jumping to $ 29.1 billion, an increase of 58% over the previous year. Unlike smaller tech companies that have reduced office space and marketed sublease space, Facebook has not reduced any of its properties in the Bay Area, despite plans to expand remote work.
The company has new offices opened this year in Burlingame for its virtual reality division Oculus and Sunnyvale. It expanded last year in Fremont. Last August, Facebook rented 730,000 square feet in Manhattan, near Penn Station.
Giant tech companions Google and Amazon also continued the relentless expansion as business prospered during the pandemic. Google said it plans to spend more than $ 1 billion on real estate in California this year, as part of its $ 7 billion growth in the United States. Google said employees may be remote until September and has not scheduled office reopening dates. Amazon bought a site in San Francisco for $ 200 million, where it is proposing a new last-mile delivery station.
The industry faces obstacles to continue dominating. Congress, states and regulators are cracking down on big technology, filing numerous lawsuits alleging antitrust behavior and other abuses, which companies have denied.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Google and Twitter testified remotely before Congress about disinformation and the role of technology in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. Facebook’s independent Supervisory Board will decide whether to permanently ban former President Donald Trump.
Roland Li is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @rolandlisf