Facebook Wants To Keep Its Employees Close To Itself

Facebook to offering monetary incentives to employees moving close to office.

Facebook Inc. is now making an offer to its employees present at the company’s headquarter situated in Silicon Valley where they will get $10,000 if they move close to the office.

All those employees who wish to get this payment need to rent or buy a house that is within 10 miles of the Facebook campus situated at hacker Way, in Menlo Park. The area is an uninhabited space of land close to a marsh that is almost 30 miles in the south of San Francisco. The massive amount being offered is a clear reflection of the barriers the tech behemoths have to deal with considering the expensive and congested spaces they get in the Bay area of San Francisco.

As per the former and present employees at FB, the social media giant started to offer this incentive a year ago. Those employees that have to support their families can actually get a onetime payment worth $15,000 or even more in certain cases as the housing benefit.

This initiative by the company is quite similar to the offerings being made by other tech giants. This includes Addepar –a company that deals in investment management technology; Palantir- a data company along with the unit of Salesforce.com Inc. known as SalesforceIQ.

Through such initiatives, the tension in the San Francisco region can be eased down to a great extent. The flow of rich and young employees that make their way to Silicon Valley by making use of private transportation make it very difficult for low waged residents to commute.

According to Daily Mail, “But Silicon Valley has a housing affordability crisis of its own, and if Facebook's program gains traction it could further accelerate the gentrification of nearby communities, especially the low-income city of East Palo Alto.”

Many of the local families in the region are destined to get hurt through this initiative. This creates a lot of concerns according to the Chief Executive Officer of Able Works- the East Palo Alto community advocacy group.

However, Facebook at this point of time is not really bothered about social consequences. According to a spokesman belonging to Facebook, “Our benefits at Facebook are designed to support our employees and the people who matter most to them at all stages of life.”

Many skeptics now believe that the initiative taken by the company is to make sure that employees spend more time at work. Also this will also help them to curb on the cost of the luxury bus service.