Nick Clegg, the president of worldwide affairs at Meta, is partly relocating to London, becoming a member of a rising record of prime executives from the US social media firm who’ve moved for all or a considerable a part of their time to the UK this yr.
Information of Clegg’s choice to separate his schedule between California and the UK comes the day after the Monetary Occasions revealed that Adam Mosseri, head of Meta’s Instagram service, was transferring to London. Chief advertising and marketing officer Alex Schultz has additionally relocated to the UK this yr.
Clegg, a former chief of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister within the UK, was promoted by Fb mother or father Meta six months in the past to tackle duty for all the corporate’s dealings with governments globally, reporting on to chief government Mark Zuckerberg.
The brand new job has additionally put him on the entrance line of dealing with the political storms which have periodically rocked the corporate, permitting Zuckerberg to flee the limelight and focus as an alternative on an tried overhaul to counter the rise of TikTok and take a lead in constructing the metaverse.
Clegg will divide his time between houses in California and London, in accordance with an individual near the scenario, and is a part of a sea change in Meta’s management. Within the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Zuckerberg was extra forthright than different tech leaders in saying that distant work would develop into a everlasting a part of how his firm operates, although it’s only this yr that numerous prime executives have moved their important bases away from Silicon Valley.
Clegg determined to spend extra time within the UK and continental Europe for what buddies say are private causes, together with desirous to be nearer to his aged dad and mom, and that he sees London as a greater base from which to journey to Europe and Asia.
Having moved to Fb in 2018, Clegg has by no means made a secret of his lack of affection for California, telling the FT in an interview final yr that he was “a European at coronary heart”. He mentioned on the time that he had not set a deadline on how lengthy he would work in California, however that his “coronary heart belongs massively 5,000 miles away”.
In a response to a query from the FT, Meta mentioned: “The previous few years have introduced new potentialities across the methods we join and work. We imagine that how folks work is much extra essential than the place they work from.”
Different prime executives to have moved away from Meta’s dwelling base in Menlo Park this yr embody Man Rosen, chief data safety officer, who’s now primarily based in Israel, and Naomi Gleit, head of product, who’s in New York. Javier Olivan, head of development, is dividing his time between California and Spain. Zuckerberg spent a lot of his time within the early a part of the pandemic at his dwelling in Hawaii and now divides his time between there and the corporate’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Fb’s shift to a brand new type of distant management is uncommon even by the requirements of the tech business, which has been probably the most forward-thinking in experimenting with new types of work for the reason that begin of the pandemic, in accordance with Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford College who has studied distant work.
Bloom added that the change in management model was simpler to drag off at firms similar to Airbnb which have gone totally distant. Against this, he mentioned, leaders working remotely at firms like Fb, Google and Microsoft face a much bigger problem, since their firms try to function in a hybrid vogue, with many employees nonetheless spending a part of their time within the workplace.
Fb has given its employees the selection between going totally distant or hybrid working the place they’re inspired to spend at the least half their time within the workplace. Clegg already manages a worldwide staff that operates remotely.
Zuckerberg’s experiment in working Meta by a extra geographically distributed management group comes as the corporate is underneath stress to drag off a tough transformation. He warned buyers final week that the corporate faces a “powerful” interval because it first seeks to overtake its current companies.
“Working totally distant may make it more durable to drag off main modifications” at a important time for the corporate since “inventive and revolutionary” work is simpler in individual, mentioned Bloom. Nevertheless, he mentioned Meta’s prime executives had been more likely to return to headquarters regularly for essential conferences, overcoming among the drawbacks.