Musk tells staff to stop working from home
New Twitter owner Elon Musk emailed his workers on Wednesday to prepare them for “difficult times ahead” and ban remote work unless he personally approved it.
Musk said there was “no way to sugarcoat the message” about the economic outlook and how it will affect an advertising-dependent company such as Twitter, according to the email seen by Bloomberg News. The new rules, which kick in immediately, will expect employees to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week, he said.
Twitter has been under Musk’s leadership for almost two weeks, in which time he has dismissed about half its workforce and most executives.
The new boss has upped the price for the Twitter Blue subscription to $8 and attached user verification to it.
Musk told workers in the email that he wanted to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue.
Prior to his arrival, Twitter had established a permanent work-from-anywhere arrangement for its workers, many of whom had initially been pushed into remote work by the Covid19 pandemic.
It was one of the first topics in an all-hands call Musk held with Twitter staff after announcing the deal to buy the company earlier in 2022. He said then that he was against remote work and would only grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis, as he is doing now.
He has also eliminated “days of rest” from Twitter staff calendars, it was reported earlier in November, which was a| monthly, companywide day off introduced during the pandemic period. Its expiration gave another sign of Musk’s impatience with Twitter’s existing work culture.
“The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” Musk wrote in his missive to employees. In a separate email, he added that “over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/ spam”.