Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for a “year of efficiency” are off to a rough start as employees accuse the CEO of destroying employee morale.
Key Details
- The last year has been difficult for Meta Platforms employees as the company announces another round of layoffs, affecting 4,000 employees.
- Some employees have responded by venting their frustrations in the internal communication channels, Fortune reports.
- “You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?” one employee writes, according to Reuters.
- Other recently fired employees have voiced their complaints via LinkedIn posts
Why it’s news
Despite Zuckerberg’s efforts to brand the year of layoffs as the year of efficiency, the headcount reductions are taking a toll on the company’s overall morale.
Meta is far from the only company to institute massive layoffs. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, laid off 12,000 employees this year, and Microsoft reduced its staff by 10,000. The tech industry enjoyed a boom during the pandemic, but now companies are forced to streamline as they look to reduce costs.
Though the layoffs have adversely affected the remaining Meta employees, investors have rewarded the company for its money-saving efforts. This year, Meta’s shares have jumped 80%, Reuters reports.
The tech giant has also instituted other streamlining efforts to reduce costs. During his year of efficiency announcement, Zuckerberg shared that the company would be cutting underperforming projects or ones that did not align with the company’s new goals.
Some of this streamlining has included reducing money spent on Zuckerberg’s favorite project—the metaverse. Reality Labs, the Meta division which works on metaverse tech, has not been excluded from recent job cuts.
Some of Reality Labs devices are also on the chopping block as the company reduces costs, Fortune reports. However, Meta is still expanding into the metaverse with a recent virtual reality app for teenagers, Horizon Worlds.
Backing up a bit
Another round of comes to Facebook as CEO Zuckerberg continues his “year of efficiency.”
Just a few months after a mass layoff of around 11,000 workers, Meta has announced another 10,000 worker layoffs and will withdraw 5,000 open roles, The Hustle reports. The combined layoffs account for a 25% reduction of Meta’s overall workforce.
In an announcement posted to Facebook, Zuckerberg shared that the company will be restructuring and focusing on “flattening (its) orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing (its) hiring rates.”
This new round of layoffs will raise Meta’s annual revenue per employee to as much as $1.85 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. While this projection depends on the social-media platform recovering some of its lost ad revenue, other tech companies are paying attention to the potential for greater earnings.
