If employees want to work remotely after March 28, they will need to request a deferral from Meta by mid-March, the company said, adding the deferrals will last between three and five months.
New York: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has delayed its U.S. office reopening date and mandated COVID-19 booster shots for employees returning to office, joining the growing list of companies revamping reopening plans as Omicron surges, Reuters reported. All workers returning to office will have to present proof of their booster jabs, while the company closely monitors the Omicron variant situation, it said.
“For employees who opt to work from office, the reopening date has been delayed to March 28 from the earlier plan of Jan. 31, the tech giant said on Monday,” the company said. If employees want to work remotely after March 28, they will need to request a deferral from Meta by mid-March, the company said, adding the deferrals will last between three and five months.
“We’re focused on making sure our employees continue to have choices about where they work given the current Covid-19 landscape,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, said in a statement. “We understand that the continued uncertainty makes this a difficult time to make decisions about where to work, so we’re giving more time to choose what works best for them.”
Other companies revamping reopening plans
Other big tech companies have also recently shifted their office reopening plans. Apple indefinitely delayed its return to work in December, pushing back a previously-set February 1st reopening. Google had planned to keep in-office work voluntary until today, January 11th, but the company pushed that back in December, saying it would wait until 2022 to make more return to office plans. Microsoft gave up predicting an office reopening date in September, and Amazon announced in October that it would let individual teams decide when they would return to offices.
US reports at least 1.1 million Covid cases in a day, shattering global record
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The United States reported at least 1.13 million new coronavirus infections on Monday, according to a Reuters tally, the highest daily total of any country in the world, as the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant showed no signs of slowing. The previous record was 1.03 million cases on January 3.
The seven-day average for new cases has tripled in two weeks to over 700,000 new infections a day.
