Social media giant TikTok is poised to adopt a stricter attendance mandate as part of its overall talent & efficiency strategy.
The Los Angeles-based social media platform will require employees across the country to return to physical offices for a full, five-day workweek, a TikTok representative confirmed. The firm joins a slew of other major tech companies that have steadily escalated mandates amid increasing competition.
The new mandate, slated to take effect next month, means TikTok’s entire workforce will be held to the same attendance policy after years in which some departments operated on a partially hybrid basis.
The plan to have employees in the office for five days a week has been percolating for some time, with TikTok workers across the company’s product, marketing and advertising departments warned about the looming decision.
For TikTok, the push to get employees back into the office full time means it will not only align with mandates from other tech giants such as Snap, Amazon and Meta’s Instagram, but also coincide with the company’s broader effort to create a focused strategy for long-term growth.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, recently spun out an American venture to operate the popular video app in the U.S. The deal was part of an effort to comply with a 2024 federal law that aimed to separate TikTok from ByteDance to address national security concerns. Under the arrangement formed earlier this year, non-Chinese investors now own about 80% of the U.S. venture.
Now established as the TikTok U.S.D.S. Joint Venture, the company leases office space in major cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and Chicago.
The company’s push to get its employees to show up to those hubs more regularly echoes a strategy adopted by other companies that have tied in-person work to stronger performance metrics.
Some of the country’s largest landlords have said that stricter in-office mandates are enough to bolster optimism that demand for space will climb, as big corporations push to revert to their pre-pandemic workweek schedules.
The number of CEOs who believed their companies would adopt a full return to a five-day workweek climbed to about 85% from the 64% reported in 2023, according to a KPMG survey.
Hybrid mandates have plummeted from about 80% to roughly 40% over the same period, and only 1% of companies continue to allow fully remote policies, according to a broad recent survey.
