After laying off 11,000 employees in November last year, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, reportedly, put the company’s middle managers on notice.
According to IANS, Zuckerberg warned managers at a recent all-hands meeting.
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who do the work,” the Meta CEO allegedly told them.
The statement appears to imply that the company, which will release its quarterly results this week, may lay off more workers.
Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at Meta, has also spoken about the need to “flatten” the organizational structure.
In one of the worst layoffs in tech history, Zuckerberg fired over 11,000 employees in November, accounting for roughly 13 percent of the global workforce, and extended the hiring freeze through Q1 2023.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram reported over 87,000 employees (as of September 2022).
In a statement, Zuckerberg stated that the company will take additional steps to become leaner and more efficient, including cutting discretionary spending and extending its hiring freeze through Q1.
He blamed the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and ads signal loss for the move, saying it caused “revenue to be much lower than I’d expected”.
“At the outset of Covid, the world was rapidly moving online, and the surge of e-commerce resulted in explosive revenue growth. Many people predicted that this would be a long-term acceleration that would last long after the pandemic was over. I felt the same way, so I decided to significantly increase our investments, ” Zuckerberg stated.
“Unfortunately, this did not go as planned,” he added.