“Going through restructuring and layoffs and changes like this is obviously very difficult,” 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 better place.
Zuckerberg’s comments capped a tumultuous period for Meta. On Wednesday, the company began handing out the latest round of pink slips in a months-long campaign to cut more than 10,000 jobs and close another 5,000 open positions.
Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has notified employees primarily concentrated in the company’s business division, including teams working on advertising, human resources and policy initiatives, that their jobs were being cut. according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private events. Senior leaders also began announcing tentative reorganization plans for their respective divisions, one of the people said.
In March, the company laid off recruiters, followed by about 4,000 cuts in tech teams at the end of April. The latest job cuts add to November’s workforce contraction, which lost about 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of Meta’s workforce.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The layoffs at Meta come as the company faces a series of threats to its business model. Startup apps like the short video network TikTok have intensified competition among social media companies for advertising dollars and users. Wider challenges in the digital advertising industry, such as new privacy regulations from Apple and slowing growth in the e-commerce market, have hurt Meta’s coffers. Meanwhile, the company’s long-term commitment to building out immersive digital worlds, known as the metaverse, is showing no immediate signs of paying off.
Zuckerberg has declared 2023 “the year of efficiency” as the company attempts to unwind a culture and management system used to facilitate easy money and hyper-growth of the workforce. Meta has attempted to reduce the number of layers of management between interns and Zuckerberg. The company has also pulled out of some projects, such as some of its hardware devices and services to support publishers.
Zuckerberg said Thursday he thinks a lower headcount will allow the company to cut red tape and make work easier. Historically, part of the problem with Meta’s culture was that there were simply too many “cooks in the kitchen”, which slowed progress.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg told employees who had been laid off in a private conversation that while he appreciated their valuable contributions to the company, their role was no longer critical to the company’s streamlined future.
“We are shifting the make-up of the company and pressuring it to get scrappier,” he said, according to a recording of the conversation The Post listened to. That push is not a “reflection on you or the work you did.”
The cuts have thrown Meta’s workforce into turmoil, which has experienced an unprecedented moral crisis as employees’ confidence in senior leadership and the company’s direction diminishes. Some have blamed top executives for failing to make better investments or decisions — issues they say led in part to the cuts. Others have complained that the company made a mistake when it planned for the layoffs to take place over several months instead of just one day.
“I understand layoffs are a part of life, but this lengthy process was excruciating,” one employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said in an interview. There was “so much uncertainty; no one got any long-term work done.
Wednesday’s cuts were especially concerning for those working on trust and security issues, as they feared the layoffs would hamper the company’s ability to respond to viral political disinformation, foreign influence campaigning and security challenges, among other things. regulations.
Zuckerberg expects to unveil new guidelines on Thursday about how and where employees will work now that concerns about the pandemic have subsided. He wants a larger “critical mass” of employees working from the office at least a few days a week to improve performance and drive culture, he said.
And the company plans to revive its internal culture by spending more time talking about future innovations, including investments in artificial intelligence.
Talking about the future is not something leaders have been able to do in recent months “because we just talked about efficiency and layoffs,” Zuckerberg said.