Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, informed staff members of the new guidelines in his first email late on Wednesday: There will be a ban on working from home, and employees must spend at least 40 hours a week in the office.
According to the company-wide email seen by CBS MoneyWatch, which was labeled “difficult times ahead,” Musk also said he wants to prepare employees for challenges amid a “dire” economic outlook, which he warned will particularly affect an advertising-dependent business like Twitter.
“The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” Musk wrote. “We are also changing Twitter policy such that remote work is no longer allowed, unless you have a specific exception.”
He added, “Starting from Thursday, everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week.”
Musk’s new workplace regulations go against a change made by Twitter’s management early in the epidemic to permit employees to work from anywhere. This change was imitated by many other businesses as they sought to make life easier for their staff members under the health catastrophe.
Experts warn that the new regulation runs the danger of alienating Twitter employees, especially after the company has had a flexible workplace policy for more than two years.
“Business owners across the country are hanging on for dear life hoping their employees will want to come back into the office,” Kathleen Quinn Votaw, a talent recruitment and retention expert, said in an email. “Nope. That’s not going to happen. We’re never going back to the way we were.”
Musk’s ownership of Twitter has had a bumpy start, marked by an advertiser backlash over worries about the social media service’s content supervision under his direction and his choice to remove 3,700 employees, or approximately half of its workforce.
In the meantime, Musk’s net worth has fallen by $100 billion this year as Tesla’s stock price declines in the midst of the Twitter upheaval. He’s also had trouble figuring out how to implement a scheme to charge $8 a month for Twitter’s blue checkmarks, which some Twitter users have mocked.
Elon Musk cautioned that the business needed to develop subscription revenue in light of the slowing advertising market in his email on Wednesday.
“Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn,” he wrote.
