Meta, the company that owns Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook, is reportedly preparing to announce a new round of layoffs in the coming days. According to reports, the company is delaying the finalization of the budget of each of its teams, which is causing operational delays and affecting the performance of the company’s employees.
Meta to lay off more staff
Meta, the social media company, may be looking to cut more staff in the near future. According to an article in the Financial Times, the company has not finalized budgets for its internal teams, which means that some of them will be affected by a new round of layoffs.
This has prevented managers in each division from planning ahead for necessary activities, disrupting operational production and even affecting projects in critical areas such as metavers and advertising, which are now taking longer to resolve.
The movement, which is currently called “the flattening” internally, also affects employee morale, which is critical of the way the “the year of efficiency“, a term used by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to describe the company’s goals for 2023, is executed. One employee stated:
Honestly, it’s still a mess. The year of efficiency starts with a lot of people getting paid to do nothing.
One of the key employees in the company’s metaverse and virtual reality (VR) division, John Carmack, left Meta in December due to operational inefficiencies despite the company’s large workforce. “I think our organization is operating at half the efficiency that would make me happy” he said at the time.
Redundancies and restructuring
If made official, this new round of layoffs would be the second announced by Meta in less than a year. The company has already executed a cut that put 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of Meta’s total workforce, on layoff. But Meta’s actions don’t stop there.
According to the same reports, the company is now going after middle managers, who are being asked to step down to non-managerial positions or to leave the company.
Despite all of these cost-cutting measures, the company said that the metaverse remains one of its primary long-term focuses and that it will continue to invest in this area. As part of its Q4 2022 earnings conference call, Meta CFO Susan Li explained that they still expect more losses in metaverse operations for 2023.
Other technology companies, such as Microsoft, have also announced layoffs as part of their restructuring processes to adapt to the new market situation after the coronavirus pandemic.