Mark Zuckerberg provided an update on Meta on his Facebook page and called the coming year a ‘”Year of Efficiency” after the company let go approximately 21,000 people in the past six months.
“Meta is building the future of human connection, and today I want to share some updates on our Year of Efficiency that will help us do that,” he wrote.
“Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, [organization] leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our [organizations], canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” he said in the post. “With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted.”
Zuckerberg said the organization will lift hiring and transfer freezes after “restructuring” various areas of the company.
In his piece, Zuckerberg said that “Flatter is faster,” and that Meta would “will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management.”
Tuesday’s layoffs focused on managers, with Zuckerberg estimating it would impact approximately 10,000 jobs and 5,000 current open roles.
“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs—and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision,” he said.
The layoffs on Tuesday affected around 13 percent of the company’s workforce, a similar percentage to what was affected in November 2022 when the social media giant laid off 11,000 workers.
Zuckerberg said he was impressed with how much faster Meta operated after the first round of layoffs.
“Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster,” the CEO wrote.
Zuckerberg said that the layoffs were all to create a “leaner” organization and to “execute its highest priorities faster.”
However, he also said that the layoffs meant more people would want to work for Meta.
“People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.”
In the previous round of layoffs in November, which affected the business and recruiting teams at Meta, Zuckerberg paid laid-off employees for 16 weeks with an additional two weeks of pay added for every year of service at the company, which wasn’t given a cap.
The company also covered health insurance for laid-off employees for six months. It is unclear if Meta will do the same for the current round of layoffs.
