A tough season of annual performance reviews at Meta and a newly permanent state of "efficiency" has some workers preparing for the worst.
The company's monthslong process of evaluating individual employee performance for 2023 is wrapping up this week, with tens of thousands of workers receiving feedback from Meta managers.
Although most employees are set to find themselves with reviews that mean they'll be keeping their jobs for another year, others fear they won't be so lucky.
As CEO Mark Zuckerberg turned last year's "year of efficiency" into a "permanent part of how we operate going forward," it became a point of pride for some managers to have smaller teams that get more done with fewer people, two people familiar with the company said. Zuckerberg, for instance, has heaped praise on the small team that built and maintains the new platform Threads.
Several organizations within Meta are still undergoing reorganizations that are expected to see some workers laid off this month. Although such cuts are expected to be incremental, 18 months of layoffs at Meta and across Big Tech have left many workers in constant fear of losing their jobs.
Starting with its first mass layoff at the end of 2022, Meta has cut 22% of its workforce. Its stock price, meanwhile, hit a record in early March. The company recently told employees their bonuses would be increased because of the company's financial performance over the past year.
One such organization going through changes is Instagram, which recently did away with the job of technical program manager, effectively resulting in an incremental layoff of a few dozen workers, as Business Insider reported.
The people familiar said the augmented-reality department within Reality Labs was also undergoing a reorg, with the department changing the scope of its work this year and allocating head count. Meta is said to be shifting more resources into generative AI and glasses projects and away from things such as app development and Horizon Worlds, its main metaverse offering that has struggled to gain traction.
"Meta has always done a lot of reorgs, moving people around, eliminating teams," a third person familiar with the company said. "But now everyone is hyper-aware of layoffs, and it's tough to find new jobs." The people asked not to be identified discussing private matters. A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
Like TPMs at Instagram, many people who are impacted by reorganizations are being offered three months to find a new position within Meta. If they fail to do so, they're set to lose their jobs.
As for performance reviews, one of the sources said some people who'd received lower ratings were also being offered three months of severance to simply leave the company without going through a formal performance-improvement-plan process. One of the people said compliance with a return-to-office mandate enacted six months ago was also a larger part of performance reviews, noting that manager enforcement of RTO had lately become "a lot more strict."
A person familiar with the company previously told BI that employees deemed to have subpar performance "will be pushed out, one way or another." Although it's still possible for a person who receives a lower performance ranking, such as "needs support," to go through a PIP process successfully, the person added that moving people out more quickly was "just the process now."
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