Facebook owner Meta Platforms is planning to cut about 5 per cent of its lowest performers with the intent of backfilling their roles this year, according to an internal memo sent to employees.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in the memo. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
Meta has not yet publicly commented on how the latest cuts will impact its Irish workforce, which currently stands at around 2,000. If the cuts were proportionate, that would imply about 100 jobs would go here. The company has already implemented a number of cutbacks since 2022 that saw more than 850 people depart the tech giant.
“My primary concern is for the staff and their families who are now coming to terms with the impact of this announcement,” Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said in a statement. “Officials at my department and IDA Ireland are actively engaged with the company in relation to possible impact for its Irish operations.”
The company expects to reach 10 per cent of “non-regrettable” attrition by the end of the current performance cycle, which includes roughly 5 per cent attrition from 2024, the memo shows. “This means we are aiming to exit approximately another 5 per cent of our current employees who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating,” the company said.
Zuckerberg noted that the company would “provide generous severance.”
The move comes days after Zuckerberg said the company would remove fact checking in the US, named Republican Joel Kaplan as global policy chief and added UFC chief executive and Donald Trump ally Dana White as a board member. The company has also rolled back its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. The Facebook founder has also praised the idea of a company having “masculine energy” in recent days.
As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs.
Affected workers in the US are expected to be notified on February 10, while those based in other countries will be informed at a later date, according to the memo. The terminations will only include staff who have been at the company long enough to be eligible for a performance review.
Zuckerberg had declared 2023 the company’s “year of efficiency” and announced plans then to eliminate 10,000 positions. Now, he’s taken on a different tone. In a note to managers, he said that the performance-based cuts are aimed at ensuring the company has the “strongest talent” and is able to “bring new people in.”
The Menlo Park, California-based company that includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among other businesses, will make headcount decisions for each organization based on their respective number of reductions last year.
In the note to staff, Zuckerberg said he’s positioning the company for what he expects to be an “intense year” focused on artificial intelligence, smart glasses and the future of social media.-- Bloomberg
