Meta To Layoff Another 10,000 Staff

Facebook’s owner Meta Platforms has confirmed that its workforce will be subjected to another brutal round of layoffs.

Last November Meta cut about 13 percent of its employees, or roughly 11,000 jobs, and multiple reports since then have warned that further job losses, equally as severe, were on the way.

On Tuesday CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to drop the hammer, and in a letter to staff informed them that he had made the “difficult decision” to axe another 10,000 positions.

He also confirmed that Meta will leave 5,000 unfulfilled job adverts closed.

Meta job losses

This second round of job cuts within four months is part of Meta’s efficiency drive after a tough 2022, where it contended with a post-pandemic slump in digital ads, coupled with heavy spending that unsettled some investors.

Zuckerberg recognised investor concern last month after Meta posted a notable decline in profits, coupled with a slight decline in revenues, which led him to promise investors that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency”.

And Zuckerberg is stick to this ‘year of efficiency’ pledge, with another round of job cuts – coupled with other actions such as “garbage collect unnecessary processes.”

“I’ve tried to be open about all the work that’s underway, and while I know many of you are energized by this, I also recognize that the idea of upcoming org changes creates uncertainty and stress,” wrote Zuckerberg. “My hope is to make these org changes as soon as possible in the year so we can get past this period of uncertainty and focus on the critical work ahead.”

“Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, cancelling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” he wrote. “With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted.”

“We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” he added. “In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”

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“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” wrote Zuckerberg. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success. They’ve dedicated themselves to our mission and I’m personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people in the same ways we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”

Flatter hierarchy

Zuckerberg then confirmed the ongoing hiring and transfer freeze, and said that Meta will “complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model.”

The hiring freeze at Meta had been implemented last September.

“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs – and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg said he wants to build a better technology company and create a flatter hierarchy within Meta by “removing multiple layers of management.”

At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring since the onset of the Covid pandemic.

Meanwhile some experts have questioned the wisdom of such large-scale job losses.

“There are often unanticipated ramifications for large-scale layoffs, which makes them risky; academic studies consistently show that layoffs don’t improve medium- or long-term company performance,” noted Forrester VP, principal analyst J.P. Gownder.

“The harm done to employee experience can take a long time to remediate,” Gownder added. “That said, Meta’s focus on streamlining and flattening the organisational structure could pay dividends, as excessive layers of management can slow down the flow of information, create siloes and bottlenecks, and inhibit creativity.”