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Elon Musk has taken a tough stance on office work, demanding it of his Tesla employees.
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Musk may soon own Twitter and held a town hall with employees on Thursday.
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Pushing back against the company’s current hybrid structure, he said people should be in the office.
Elon Musk prefers employees in the office, for the most part, he told Twitter employees.
At a town hall with Twitter employees on Thursday, Elon Musk — who submitted a bid to buy the social media company for $44 billion but publicly balked on the spambot issue — answered questions about how which he would run the company, from layoffs to product management.
One important thing: He really prefers in-person work, Insider reported.
“You want to aspire to do things in person,” he said during the meeting, according to a recording one attendee shared with Insider.
Leslie Berland, who is responsible for people and CMO of Twitter, told the town hall that 1,500 “tweeps” (aka Twitter employees) are completely distant. The others, about 6,000, are usually hybrids.
Musk said he thinks only high-level employees should be able to avoid the office, generally speaking.
“If someone is exceptional at their job, then there’s a chance they’ll be effective, even while working remotely,” he said.
Musk added that he asked his Tesla executives to come up with a list of people who are “great contributors” and then figure out whether or not remote work would work.
Still, in the case of allowing someone to work from home, Musk would want them to come over to get to know his colleagues. “If you’re walking down the street and you pass your colleague and you don’t recognize him, that wouldn’t be good,” he added.
“The bias must definitely be heavily skewed toward in-person work,” he said later, in response to a follow-up question from Berland.
Musk acknowledged that Twitter does not manufacture the same product as Tesla, his electric vehicle company. But he was pretty firm with the employees there.
Musk reportedly told Tesla executives in late May to come to office or quit. he later said on Twitter that “they should pretend to work somewhere else”. The Washington Post said it checked the email with a Tesla employee.
Insider got an email Musk sent to Tesla employees regarding in-person work
“Everyone at Tesla is required to spend at least 40 hours in the office per week,” the email reads. “If you don’t show up, we’ll assume you quit.”
Twitter offered a permanent work-from-home option in 2020, and the potential change under new ownership seemed to alarm employees.
A source who was at the meeting told Insider that the Slack company had begun to “call out” Musk’s stated stance on working from home. Twitter and Elon Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read all of Insider’s takeaways from Elon Musk’s Town Hall with Twitter here.
Read the original article on Business Insider
