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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to rally the troops Thursday after multiple rounds of layoffs decimated the social media giant’s workforce.
Zuckerberg told employees during a company-wide briefing that he hopes Facebook’s parent company will have more stability but less bureaucracy in the future, according to a recording of the call overheard by The Washington Post.
“Going through restructuring, layoffs and changes like this is obviously a very difficult thing,” Zuckerberg said. “So it’s not like we end up exactly where we were before because that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to go to a shabbier place.”
Zuckerberg’s comments capped a turbulent time for Meta. On Wednesday, the company began issuing the final pink slips in a month-long campaign to cut more than 10,000 jobs and close another 5,000 open positions.
Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, notified employees who worked primarily in the company’s line of business, which includes teams working on advertising, human resources and policy initiatives, that their jobs would be cut. according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke about private events on condition of anonymity. According to one of the people, senior executives also began to announce tentative restructuring plans for their respective departments.
The company laid off recruiters in March, followed by around 4,000 cuts in its technical teams in late April. The latest job cuts complement the November workforce reduction that wiped out about 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of Meta’s workforce.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Meta’s layoffs come as the company grapples with a number of threats to its business model. Emerging apps like short video network TikTok have intensified competition between social media companies for advertising money and users. Bigger challenges in the digital advertising industry, like new privacy regulations from Apple and slowing growth in the e-commerce market, have weighed on Meta’s coffers. Meanwhile, the company’s long-term strategy of building immersive digital worlds called the Metaverse shows no immediate signs of paying off.
Zuckerberg has declared 2023 the “Year of Efficiency” as the company seeks to do away with a culture and management system geared towards easy money and excessive staff growth. Meta has attempted to reduce the number of layers of management between interns and Zuckerberg. The company has also withdrawn some projects, such as some of its hardware devices and services to support publishers.
Zuckerberg said Thursday that he believes having fewer employees will allow the company to cut red tape and get work done more easily. Historically, part of the problem with metaculture was that there were just too many “cooks in the kitchen,” slowing progress.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg privately told the laid-off employees that while he appreciates their valuable contributions to the company, their role is no longer critical to the company’s optimized future.
“We’re changing the makeup of the company and pushing it to be more combative,” he said, according to a recording of the call overheard by The Post. This push is not a “reflection on you or the work you’ve done.”
The cuts have roiled Meta’s workforce, which is experiencing an unprecedented morale crisis as employees’ confidence in leadership and the company’s direction wanes. Some blame top executives for failing to make better investments or not making hiring decisions — issues they say partially led to the cuts. Others have complained that the company made a mistake in scheduling the layoffs over several months instead of just a day.
Meta begins new layoffs that will result in significant headcount losses
“I understand layoffs are a part of life, but the lengthy process was unbearable,” said one worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, in an interview. There was “so much uncertainty; Nobody has done long-term work.”
Wednesday’s cuts were of particular concern to those working in trust and security, as they feared the layoffs would affect the company’s ability to respond to viral political misinformation, foreign influence campaigns and regulatory challenges, among others.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg said he expects to unveil new guidelines about how and where employees will work after concerns about the pandemic eased. He would like more “critical mass” of employees collaborating from the office at least a few days a week to improve performance and strengthen culture, he said.
And the company plans to revitalize the internal culture by spending more time talking about its future innovations, including its investments in artificial intelligence, among other things.
Talking about the future is something executives haven’t been able to do for the past few months “because all we’ve been talking about is efficiency and layoffs,” Zuckerberg said.