The global Facebook outage last Tuesday highlighted one of the problems with employees being permanently out of the office: in the event of a service failure that connects them to the company, they are unavailable. This has led Facebook, which advocated for fully remote work after the pandemic, to announce that this policy will be discontinued.
The era of telecommuting appears to have come to an end for Facebook employees after the company announced a full return to the office and employees have three months to return to the office. And keep in mind that if a large company like Facebook does it, many others will follow.
Facebook's downfall demonstrates one of the risks of telecommuting
The news comes days after Facebook suffered a global crash that affected its services and caused it to lose millions in services, commissions and market value. They believe it would have been a lot less devastating if the workers had been at their US headquarters from the beginning, so they would have fixed the problem sooner.
It does not mean that Facebook is going to force all workers to do all their hours in the office and it is not going to give remote work anymore. By default, all workers return to the office and whoever wants to work remotely from their home or favorite coworking space, must formally request it and be given permission. In this case, it would be applying the hybrid model that combines the benefit for workers of not having to go to work every day, and that there is a certain presence in the office to establish the right relationships and communications to carry out large projects and ideas.
Google and Apple also advocate this hybrid working model. Although the biggest problem with this model is that due to having to go to the office regularly, although less often; it continues to force people to move to cities with a high cost of living if they do not want to make long trips. Remote work is for many, the option of being able to go to a city with a cheaper rent that allows them to save, and it is proposed as the solution to Empty Spain and even to give job opportunities to people who live in cities and towns with poor communication.
Source: TechRadar
