Meta plans to cut 5% of its workforce, focusing on the lowest performers. Read the memo Mark Zuckerberg sent to staff.
Mark Zuckerberg told staff he “decided to raise the bar on performance management.”
Meta is planning to cut 5% of staff with a focus on its lowest performers, B-17 has learned.
Mark Zuckerberg has told employees he “decided to raise the bar on performance management” and act quickly to “move out low-performers,” according to an internal memo seen by B-17.
The Meta chief wrote in a post on Workplace, the company’s internal forum, that the company will make “more extensive performance-based cuts” during this year’s performance review cycle.
Two Meta employees told B-17 that the company kickstarted its annual performance review process last week by having employees submit their self-reviews, peer reviews, and manager reviews.
Zuckerberg said that impacted employees in the US would be notified on February 10.
In a separate memo seen by B-17, Meta’s director of people development growth programs, Hillary Champion, told managers that the company is “aiming to exit approximately another 5% of our current employees who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating.”
Meta employed 72,404 people globally as of September 30, 2024, according to its most recent earnings report, meaning the cuts would be equivalent to about 3,600 roles.
Champion added that employees terminated for performance will ‘”receive generous severance packages, in line with previous cuts
Meta last week said it would dismantle its DEI-focused team and scrap diversity programs in its hiring process. The company’s vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, said in the memo announcing the changes that the term DEI has “become charged” partly because it is “understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
It also made changes to its content moderation policies earlier that week, including getting rid of third-party fact-checkers in favor of a community notes model similar to X.
In March 2023, Meta laid off 10,000 workers — the second wave of cuts at the company in four months — in what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17
Read the full memo below:
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies in the world – – AI, glasses as the next computing platform, and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.
I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster. 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 – – with the intention of backfilling these roles in 2025. We won’t manage out everyone who didn’t meet expectations for the last period if we’re optimistic about their future performance, and for those we do let go we’ll provide generous severance in line with what we’ve provided with previous cuts.
We’ll follow up with more guidance for managers ahead of calibrations. People who are impacted will be notified on February 10 — or later for those outside the US.
Letting people go is never easy. But I’m confident this will strengthen our teams and help us build leading technology to enable the future of human connection.
