Many employees at Facebook (now known as Meta) are reportedly expecting more job cuts at Mark Zuckerberg’s company following the latest round of employee performance reviews in which thousands of workers received subpar ratings.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in a recent round of performance reviews, Facebook gave thousands of employees subpar ratings, indicating that additional job cuts may be coming soon. Senior executives have taken several actions to reduce the company’s bonus metric after CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be a “year of efficiency.”
Facebook management reportedly anticipates that the low ratings will cause more employees who see the writing on the wall to resign in the upcoming weeks, and if not enough do, the business may consider more layoffs. 13 percent of the company’s employees, or about 11,000 workers, were recently let go.
About 10 percent of employees received ratings from Facebook managers indicating they were underperforming, this percentage is not unusual in the years prior to the pandemic. However, several people with knowledge of the situation noted that Facebook’s workforce nearly doubled from 2019 to 2022, to 86,400. About half of its employees have never participated in a typical performance-review cycle at the company.
In conjunction with their performance reviews, Facebook informed employees that the company’s performance, a factor in employee bonuses, would be paid out at 85 percent of its target. According to people familiar with past bonus figures, this figure — one of three used to determine each employee’s annual bonus — was down at least 15 percentage points from the previous year and fell below 100 percent for the first time since the first half of 2018.
Facebook has struggled over the past 18 months due to a harsh economic environment, increasing competition from TikTok, and a decline in advertising demand spurred by Apple’s privacy changes. Since focusing on artificial intelligence technologies in 2022 to enhance its ad-targeting and content-recommendation tools, the company’s prospects have started to improve.
The effects of Apple’s ad-tracking changes, which the social media company predicted would cost it $10 billion in revenue in 2022, have been a source of contention for Facebook since April 2021. Facebook has experienced year-over-year revenue declines over the last three quarters. Marne Levine served as the company’s chief business officer during that time. On Monday, she announced that she would be leaving her position and the company this summer.
Facebook announced layoffs in November in response to its difficult financial situation. Additionally, it cut back on office space, had some employees share desks, and extended a hiring freeze until the first quarter of 2023.
These changes appear to be having an effect, with Facebook reporting a net profit of $4.7 billion for the fourth quarter, an increase from the third quarter, despite ongoing revenue declines. That ended a run of three quarters during which the company’s profit declined from the previous quarter — a slump unlike any it had seen in the past decade.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan