Meta gives poor performance reviews to thousands of workers

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has reportedly rated thousands of employees as “below average” in a recent spate of performance reviews. And that’s fueling fears among workers that the belt could be tightened even further.

Those concerns come after CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 a “year of efficiency” for the company on a conference call in early February. Meta also scrapped a bonus metric, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Managers gave the bad ratings to about 10% of the company’s employees. In a way, it’s a return to Meta’s pre-pandemic vetting process, in which Zuckerberg was said to have been anything but gentle with his assessments of workers.

The threat of more layoffs comes just days after the company delayed finalizing budgets. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post earlier this month, “We are working on flattening our organizational structure, removing some layers of middle management to make decisions more quickly, and using AI tools to help our engineers be more productive be. As part of this, we will be more proactive in cutting back on projects that are underperforming or may not be as important anymore.”

The Metaverse department of Meta seems to be safe from the cuts. While Horizon Worlds has failed to attract users, including some of the company’s employees, and its Reality Labs division was responsible for $13.7 billion in losses last year, Zuckerberg is sticking with it.

Other departments don’t seem to have this protected status.

“We ended the last year with some tough layoffs and restructuring of some teams,” Zuckerberg said in his post. “As we did this, I made it clear that this is the beginning of our focus on efficiency, not the end.”