Meta is about to undergo another round of workforce reduction. The social media giant announced that about 5% of its global workforce will be laid off this year. This news has Meta employees on their toes, as the layoffs will affect the company’s lowest performers.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made this information official via an internal memo on Tuesday. The tech CEO shared on Meta’s workplace forum that he expects 2025 to be challenging, necessitating the company’s decision to “move out low performers faster.” In a separate message by another Meta director, the company reiterated its poise to downsize by “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers.”
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Industry watchers are not surprised by big tech’s latest drive for workforce optimization. One of Meta’s largest layoffs occurred between 2022 and 2023 when the company’s staff cuts affected approximately 21,000 jobs. According to the latest quarterly report, Meta has over 72,000 employees. This infers that roughly 3,600 will leave the company in February as part of the employee severance drill.
The internal memo discussing the latest organizational change at Meta explains that employees affected by the job elimination process will be notified by February 10. This information was first made public on Bloomberg. Workforce optimization and employee severance are some of the difficult responsibilities of the talent management team of a company. Unfortunately, Meta’s talent management team already has the marching order to eliminate redundancies in the company’s workforce.
Beyond Meta’s ‘poor performance‘ excuse, there are other possible causes of the announced staff cuts. Some speculators suggest that Meta’s workforce reduction and organizational change are an adventurous effort to gain favor with the incoming Trump administration.
Last week, Zuckerberg made a public video announcement explaining Meta’s departure from its third-party fact-checking program. During this announcement, the tech CEO suggested that Meta would adopt a “Community Notes” model like Elon Musk’s X. According to him, this new strategy would help reduce the wrongful flagging of posts and restriction of social media accounts. Finally, Zuckerberg explained that this policy change applies to all its social media platforms: Threads, Facebook and Instagram.
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During the video announcement, Zuckerberg also said, “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes.” So, in the grand scheme of things, Meta’s downsizing, workforce reduction, job elimination, and talent management stunts in the coming months are essentially efforts at political adaptation.