In a development that shows how fast the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook announced today that it will finally continue to encourage the majority of its workers to apply for a permanent shift in their employment and enable them to live abroad. Today, the organization will continue by making most of its US job vacancies available for remote workers, and later this year will begin accepting applicants for permanent remote jobs from its employees.

“We will be the most forward-looking far-reaching company on our scale,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview. Yet I think it’s realistic for us to get to about half of the company operating remotely indefinitely in the next five or 10 years — maybe closer or 10 than five but somewhere in that area.

Facebook, which has more than 48,000 employees working in 70 offices around the world, is the largest company yet aggressively moving into remote work following the pandemic. Last week, Twitter revealed it would give most of its employees the opportunity to operate remotely, and on Wednesday, Coinbase followed up with a similar note. Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, said Thursday that a move to permanent remote work will commence immediately. This week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge that the company is considering additional remote work flexibility beyond allowing most staff to stay home through the end of the year.

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Collectively, the adoption of remote employment upends decades of traditional thinking in Silicon Valley, where the biggest companies were built around the concept of near physical proximity to teamwork. Until recently, Facebook has paid a salary of up to $15,000 to prospective hires if they plan to stay within 10 miles of the workplace. Now all of them will be free to work anywhere they like — though Facebook will lower the salaries of employees going to less competitive places. The shift to remote work for Facebook has been borne out of necessity in the near term. Once the firm begins reopening some of its offices on July 6th, it is preparing to reduce occupancy to 25 percent of normal, the firm said this week. And the extra health standards for going into the workplace, including compulsory helmets and temperature sensors, are likely to keep other employees away for a long time.

But Zuckerberg said he was convinced of the advantages of a more mobile workplace after surveying workers and consulting with executives at other businesses founded on remote employees. The switch would free up jobs on Facebook to a much larger range of candidates and could have a positive effect on the environment.

The move also forces Facebook to rely on those tools to get the job done, which is investing billions in creating next-generation communication tools. In this way, switching to remote work is a high-stakeholder effort to get Facebook workers to “dogfood” emerging technologies that include augmented reality, virtual reality, the company’s Portal digital interface, and its Workplace teamwork tool — and to develop them more efficiently out of need, because the organization depends on them to get the job done. But the transfer entails threats, too. Employees at Facebook and other major tech firms have been collaborating on proposals since March, which were set in motion by peers collaborating together on campus.

Conclusion:

It remains an open question whether companies in environments where they are not brainstorming around the same conference table can be as creative or productive over the long term. (Some would say, in recent years, Facebook hasn’t been especially innovative, anyway.)