Meta delays setting team budgets as the company prepares for another round of layoffs
Tweet
The social media giant Meta has delayed planning and setting the budgets for multiple teams as the company prepares for another round of job cuts. It seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to contain the tech business’s costs in his “year of efficiency” have caused much disruption within the company.
According to the Financial Times, two Meta employees have spoken about the situation. As said, there has been a lack of clarity within the organization in recent weeks about budgets and future headcount. Consequently, Meta staff has complained that they are getting zero work done because managers are not able to plan their workloads for the future due to a lack of budget information.
Decisions and projects that usually took only days to sign are now being dragged across weeks, even a month, in some cases. This issue prevails even in priority areas such as the metaverse and advertising. Typically, certain budgets would get finalized by the end of the year at Meta. Employees describe the current situation in Meta's offices as a mess. The year of efficiency seems to be starting off with a whole lot of employees getting paid to do nothing.
This comes at a time when Meta is planning the next round of job cuts. The Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp parent previously let go of 11,000 of its employees in November, affecting 13% of the total headcount. The job cuts and the financial uncertainty have already made the remaining workers demotivated and demoralized.
Zuckerberg plans to wrestle the costs of the social media company in his year of efficiency. Meta’s shares already rose by 18% and added $88 billion to the market value of the business. The past year was rough on many of the big tech stocks which relied on advertising dollars. The macroeconomic conditions had marketers tightening their budgets in recent months, which led to massive layoffs in the tech sector worldwide.
Meta’s finances began worrying its Wall Street investors last year, as the company made a giant investment of $10 billion for metaverse and increased headcount while the slowing down economy began devouring up the profits.
Meta expects to cut off more jobs around March this year and is currently going through performance reviews of staff to decide who gets the cut. Zuckerberg has told analysts that they are working on flattening the org structure, removing layers in the middle management to make decision-making faster. Meta will also be proactive about terminating low-performing or low-priority projects as well.
In certain cases, the managers of Meta have been asked to either move to individual or contributor roles where they don’t manage anyone or leave the company. Employees believe that this is a demotion that has been simply nicknamed “the flattening.”
PREVIOUS ARTICLES
Make your resume stronger with additional information
Microsoft cuts HoloLens Xbox and Surface jobs