Meta employees are back in the office three days a week as part of new mandate
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, Dec. 20, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta’s return-to-office mandate went into effect Tuesday, requiring employees to work from the company’s physical locations at least three days a week.
The company began notifying employees in June of the coming change, which will not affect Meta’s current roster of remote workers. Any employee assigned to an office, however, will need to comply with the rules starting this week.
“We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday in a statement. “In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we’re being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work.”
Facebook parent Meta first extended its remote-work policy to all full-time employees in June 2021. During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company learned that “good work can get done anywhere, and I’m even more optimistic that remote work at scale is possible, particularly as remote video presence and virtual reality continue to improve.”
But since then, many tech giants, such as Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, have reversed course on previous remote work policies, calling on staffers to return to physical offices at least three days a week or potentially face consequences. At Amazon, some employees are being told to relocate to different states to keep their roles, and some have quit rather than adhering to those demands.
As part of Meta’s “Year of Efficiency,” Zuckerberg hinted in a March blog post that he was going to update Meta’s policy after the company conducted an internal analysis that showed engineers who work in person “get more done.”
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.”
Courtesy: Uber Eats
Uber said Monday that Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, one of the company’s longest-tenured top executives and the head of is delivery business is leaving after almost 13 years.
Gore-Coty joined Uber as a general manager in France in 2012, and worked his way up to become vice president of mobility for the Europe and Middle East region four years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named senior vice president of delivery in 2021.
“It’s hard to imagine Uber without Pierre, because there hasn’t been much Uber without Pierre,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement that was part of a regulatory filing. “As one of our first employees, he was a driving force behind our global Mobility expansion and stepped up to run Uber Eats just weeks before the first Covid lockdowns.”
The company didn’t say what Gore-Coty plans to do next.
Uber also said that Andrew Macdonald, the company’s senior vice president of mobility and business operations, will become chief operating officer, reporting to Khosrowshahi. Macdonald, 41, will oversee the company’s global mobility, delivery and autonomous businesses in addition to “key cross-platform functions like membership, customer support, safety, and more,” the filing said.
Gore-Coty is one of 11 people listed on Uber’s executive team page. Macdonald is the only one who has worked at the company longer. He joined in May 2012, four months before Gore-Coty, according to LinkedIn.
“These last nearly 13 years have been the ride of a lifetime,” Gore-Coty said in the statement. “It was a true team effort, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built and the impact we’ve had on daily life in cities around the world.”
Uber shares were little changed in extended trading after closing on Monday at $83.64. The stock is up 39% this year, while the Nasdaq is about flat.
Last month, the company reported first-quarter results that beat on earnings but missed on revenue. A month earlier, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, alleging that the company engaged in “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” related to its Uber One subscription service.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khosrowshahi characterized the lawsuit as “a bit of a head-scratcher for us.”
WATCH: Record earnings and policy uncertainty will slow the equity rally.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images
German antitrust regulators warned Amazon on Monday that the company’s pricing mechanisms for third-party sellers could run afoul of competition laws.
The Federal Cartel Office said in its preliminary assessment that Amazon’s pricing controls limit the visibility of merchants’ products and, “based on non-transparent marketplace rules,” interfere with their freedom to set prices.
Amazon uses algorithms and statistical models to calculate certain price caps for products, the Cartel Office said. Products that are flagged as having “prices that are too high” or “prices that are not competitive” can then be demoted in search results, excluded from advertising or removed from the buy box, they added.
The buy box is the listing that pops up first when a visitor clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when a shopper taps “Add to Cart.”
“Competition in online retail in Germany is largely determined by Amazon’s rules for the trading platform,” Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement. “Since Amazon competes directly with other marketplace retailers on its platform, influencing competitors’ pricing, even in the form of price caps, is fundamentally questionable from a competition perspective.”
Amazon’s pricing practices not only threaten sellers’ businesses, but could also harm other retailers by deterring them from offering lower prices, the Cartel Office said.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company strongly disagrees with the Cartel Office’s preliminary findings. They added that any changes to Amazon’s pricing mechanisms would be “bad for customers and selling partners.”
“If Amazon is prevented from helping people find competitively priced offers, it will lead to a bad shopping experience for them, as we’d need to promote uncompetitive or even abusive pricing in our store,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This would mislead customers into thinking they’re getting good value when, in reality, they’re not.”
Amazon can provide feedback to the Cartel Office on its preliminary assessment before it reaches a final decision.
Amazon in 2022 reached a deal with European Union antitrust regulators who were investigating its use of seller data and buy box practices. As part of the settlement, Amazon agreed to display a second buy box on products sold in Europe when there is a second competing offer that’s different on price or delivery.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing Amazon’s use of pricing algorithms on its sprawling third-party marketplace as part of a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit filed in 2023. Amazon has said the FTC’s complaint is “wrong on the facts and the law.”
The case is set to go to trial in October 2026.
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