Last October, when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company would be transforming into a new era with a new mission, one thing has stayed the same for its management team: Remote work. The company’s top leaders are scattering to locations far from parent company Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, The Wall Street Journal reports.

This bucks the trend of other Big Tech firms, like Google and Apple, and Wall Street investment banks, which are requiring their employees to return to their offices.

Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, moved to New York, and Alex Schulz, chief marketing officer, will soon be moving to the United Kingdom. Meta’s Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan has been splitting time between California and Europe, and Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen, is planning on moving to Israel soon.

Mark Zuckerberg, the powerful founder of the company, has also joined the trend, and is splitting his time between his mansion in Hawaii and work at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.

Largely caused by the pandemic,  remote work (otherwise known as WFH, or work from home) has created new opportunities. But few companies are using WFH as much as Meta’s senior leadership.

“The past few years have brought new possibilities around the ways we connect and work,” Meta spokesman Tracy Clayton told The Journal. “We believe that how people work is far more important than where they work.”

Signs of Employee Discontent?

Meta announced last summer that all full-time employees could request to WFH, but the company is going even further. Meta is now in the process of rolling out a hybrid model, allowing all employees, not just executives, to work in WFH far from Silicon Valley.

Amid the COVID lockdowns, millions of Americans used to 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. workdays in offices and long commutes home found themselves suddenly free to work from home on their laptops, to communicate with co-workers and clients via Zoom, and, to some degree, to call their own hours.

The newfound emancipation from desks even helped spur “The Great Resignation,” with millions of American workers quitting their jobs over the past six months. The tight labor market has given those still working the mettle to ask for higher pay, better benefits, and more flexible hours.

Meta is not immune from these trends, either. A majority, 69%, of Meta employees are considering leaving their job in the next three months, per an anonymous survey conducted by Blind. Additionally, 40% have applied for another job, and 34% have been on job interviews for a new position.

The sample size is not small, either, as 39,000 employees from Meta reportedly use the anonymous social media company Blind to seek career and interview advice, Human Resource Director reports.

New Workplace, New Mission

The rise in company employees working remotely coincides with Meta’s new focus: Expanding into the metaverse. Meta’s ambitious growth into the metaverse—defined as a cloud connected network of 3D virtual worlds via virtual reality headsets, is directly—

correlates with the company’s new acceptance of remote work.

Zuckerberg himself sees Meta’s new approach as shaping the future of remote work. Describing how Facebook’s role has moved on from being solely a social media company, Zuckerberg noted to CBS last August that post-COVID, the future of work has been forever changed.

“Whether it’s video conferencing, or eventually being able to collaborate better in the metaverse, in products like Workrooms, what we built here, I think, is all just part of this progression of giving people more freedom to live where they want,” Zuckerberg said.