Snapchat’s company staff told to be in office 4 days a week

Snap Inc. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel told employees that he expects them to be in the social media company’s offices in person 80% of the time starting in February.

“I believe that spending more time together in person will help us to achieve our full potential,” he wrote, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg. That means 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.

“What each of us may sacrifice in terms of our individual convenience, I believe we will reap in terms of our collective success,” Spiegel wrote.

Snap, which makes the visual communication app Snapchat, has spent much of the second half of this year shrinking and narrowing the company’s focus. In August, it fired 20% of its workforce and cut projects that won’t help revenue growth or the company’s augmented reality technology. The company hasn’t been able to increase its revenue as quickly as expected as marketers reduced their advertising budgets.

Snap is the latest company to formally bring employees back to the office as Covid-19 restrictions eased. Apple Inc. asked employees to be in three days per week beginning in September. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter Inc., has insisted employees work from the office, even though the company had previously told staff they could work from anywhere “forever.” Many of Wall Street’s biggest banks have eliminated work-from-home policies.

For Snap, the new “default together” policy will apply to employees in all 30 global offices. 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.”