Meta looks to lay off 10,000 more staff and close 5,000 open roles in 'Year of Efficiency'

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, is looking to let go of around 10,000 more staff and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that the tech giant hasn't yet hired, following a massive layoff of 11,000 staff last November.

According to an official update on Meta's "Year of Efficiency", Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in order to improve the company's financial performance in a difficult environment and execute its long term vision, organisation leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening its organisations, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing its hiring rates over the next couple of months. The recruitment team will also be reduced since the focus is to hire less, “We expect to announce restructuring and layoffs in our tech groups in late April and then our business groups in May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”

The timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details, he said. "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," he added. 

"This will be tough and there’s no way around that. 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," Zuckerberg added. 

After the restructure is finalised, Meta plans to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group. Zuckerberg said that other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete Meta’s analysis from its hybrid work year of learning so the tech firm can further refine the distributed work model. Furthermore, Meta also aims to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year.

This comes as Zuckerberg described 2023 as "the Year of Efficiency", meaning there's a need to build a leaner, more technical company and improving its business performance to enable its long term vision. 

He went on to explain that a flatter firm is faster and by making its organisation flatter by removing multiple layers of management, Meta will ask managers to become “individual contributors” and also ask these contributors to “report into almost every level” so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster. Meta still thinks that managing each person is important, so it doesn’t want managers to have more than 10 direct reports. This way, each manager’s capacity and defragment layers can be fully utilised.

Zuckerberg also added that a leaner organisation will execute its highest priorities faster. Employees will be more productive, and their work will be “more fun and fulfilling”. “That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organisation as lean as possible,” he added. 

The tech giant will also be investing in tools that will make it most effective over many years, whether that’s building AI tools to help engineers write better code faster, enabling it to automate workloads over time, or identifying obsolete processes that it can phase out.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out to Meta for more information. 

Back in last November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 staff, approximately 13% of its global headcount. Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees that it is also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter of next year. 

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