The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic were hectic for any business, be it a startup or a Fortune 50 behemoth. At Facebook's Chicago office, employees were one week away from moving into a brand-new space before being told they were working from home.
"I literally sent out an email and I said, 'The office is shutting down. Grab your computer monitor if you can,'" said Nikki Newsome, the company's chief culture officer in its Chicago office.
The shift to remote work wasn't the only huge change for Facebook. It also went through a major rebrand last year with a focus on the metaverse.
Now operating as Meta (NASDAQ: FB), the company is bringing employees back to work, including at its new Loop office, which officially opened its doors in August to employees who wanted a break from work-from-home life, Newsome said. Employees can request to still work fully remote, or delay their return to the office until later in the year.
Meta's Chicago office has grown to more than 500 employees, Newsome said. Its local growth comes as the company approaches its 15-year anniversary in Chicago next month. Launched in 2007, Facebook's first Chicago office consisted of a small sales outpost with fewer than 10 employees. Today, in addition to sales employees, it's home to recruiting, product and operations, legal, global business marketing and even some engineering roles, Newsome said.
"It's crazy that it started out as this small sales office and has grown to what it is today," said Newsome, who joined the company in 2017 when the Chicago location had fewer than 100 workers. "It's definitely a point of pride. ... What attracts everyone to our office is the people and the culture. To see how it's evolved, it's been really rewarding."
As workers return to the office, they're coming back to perks like an in-house pastry chef who makes biscuits and other baked goods by hand each morning. Meta has three cafes in its Chicago office: its signature cafe named "Abe Froman" (in a nod to Ferris Bueller's Day Off); "Chupacabra," which offers street food; and the "Facebook District," where employees can find locally sourced eats.
There are other Chicago Easter eggs sprinkled throughout Meta's office. It has a wing of conference rooms named after famous local TV commercials, like Glen Lerner, Bob Rohrman and carpet company Empire. It has another wing dedicated to famous Chicago African Americans like the Obamas and Ida B. Wells. The company also has a large Chicago skyline graphic in the office as a backdrop for employee photos.
Newsome said Meta's Chicago office will continue to grow but declined to offer specific headcount numbers for the future. She said diversity and inclusion continue to be important to the company: 70% Meta's Chicago leadership team is female and 70% are people of color.
Newsome said Facebook also wants to make sure it's giving back to the Chicago community, whether that's giving food to local food banks (the company donated two tons of meat to the Greater Chicago Food Depository in 2020 when employees were sent home due to the pandemic), spotlighting local small businesses during company all-hands meetings or working on initiatives to help local students learn STEM.
"Chicago has been so good to us, we want to continue to be good to Chicago," she said.
