‘Mess’ Reported at Meta as Company Plans New Layoffs

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” is reportedly off to a rocky start.

The company has delayed the budgets for several of its teams while planning a new round of layoffs, two employees with knowledge of the situation tell the Financial Times (FT).

The FT report, published Saturday (Feb. 11), says the employees say staffers have complained there is no work getting done, with management unable to plan and a lack of clarity surrounding budgets or headcounts.

“Honestly, it’s still a mess,” said one employee. “The year of efficiency is kicking off with a bunch of people getting paid to do nothing.”

PYMNTS has contacted Meta for comment but has not yet received a reply.

As PYMNTS wrote at the beginning of the month, “efficiency” has been Meta’s watchword of late, with the word appearing dozens of times on the company’s last earnings call.

“We’ve entered a phase change for the company … we will be more proactive about cutting projects and increasing efficiency around executing our top priorities.” Zuckerberg told investors.

PYMNTS noted that this focus “could help lessen concerns that the company is overspending on its virtual reality ambitions.”

Investor concerns that Zuckerberg had been too focused on Meta’s metaverse ambitions at the expense of the company’s core businesses helped fuel a 64% decline in the price of the company’s shares, the worst performance in the social media company’s two-decade history.

Meta saw a roughly $700 billion drop in market value between October 2021 and October 2022. In November 2022, the firm undertook its first-ever major headcount reduction, slashing 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.

The company warned earlier this month that investors should expect its metaverse project Reality Labs (RL) to continue to lose money throughout 2023.

“It’s important to not think of RL as one thing, there’s AR work long-term, VR which is starting to ramp up, and the smallest spike by budget is the metaverse software program, which doesn’t reflect the importance of it — software is just less capital intensive to build,” Zuckerberg said. “But within each of those areas, there are a lot of different things we are doing.”

Now, the company is planning further layoffs, the FT report said. Three workers interviewed by the news outlet said the cuts and uncertainty had left staff unmotivated and depressed.

The report said the job cuts could come next month, as Meta is in the midst of conducting performance reviews.

The layoffs are part of a wave of job cuts at tech companies that began last year and have continued into 2023.

U.S. based companies cut 102,943 jobs in January, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, with 41% of them coming from the tech sector. Last year, the industry slashed 153,000 jobs, with companies like Microsoft and Google announcing fresh layoffs this year.