Snap employees have been told that they’re expected to be the social media company’s offices at least 80% of the time starting in February, according to a Bloomberg report Monday.
“I believe that spending more time together in person will help us to achieve our full potential,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo reviewed by Bloomberg. “What each of us may sacrifice in terms of our individual convenience, I believe we will reap in terms of our collective success.”
Snap’s plan translates to an average of four or more days per week in the office for full-time employees, he said, with some flexibility allowed for work-related tasks such as client meetings to count as in-office time.
Snap, the parent company of disappearing-message app Snapchat, has spent the past few months restructuring its business in light of slowed revenue growth. Spiegel announced in a memo to employees in August that the company would lay off approximately 20% of its staff, or about 1,300 workers. Multiple projects have been scrapped, including the camera-enabled Pixy drone, Snap Originals, Zenly and Snapchat’s games.
Snap is the latest tech company to rein in work-from-home policies after roughly two years of remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Tech giants such as Apple, Google and Twitter have announced plans requiring their workers to go back into offices at least several days a week.
Snap’s new “default together” policy will apply to employees in all 30 global offices, Bloomberg reported, adding that the company is developing an exceptions process for staff requesting to work remotely as their default.
“We’ve been working this way for so long that I’m afraid we’ve forgotten what we’ve lost — and what we could gain — by spending more time together,” Spiegel said. “I believe that ‘default together,’ while retaining flexibility for our team members, will help us to accelerate our growth and deliver on our strategic priorities of growing our community, reaccelerating our revenue growth, and leading in AR.”
Snap didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
