Facebook owner Meta has told staff it will cut around 5% of its global workforce, and will use the company’s performance management system to do so.
In a memo to staff, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he would “move out low performers faster” and would be accelerating the use of Meta’s performance management system.
The decision would see around 3,600 of its global workforce cut, although the company has said it will hire new people to fill these roles later this year.
“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year,” Zuckerberg told staff, “but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
According to the memo, seen by Bloomberg, US employees will be notified in early February while other staff will find out later. Those that lose their jobs could receive a “generous severance”, he added.
Zuckerberg said the plans to improve workforce performance came ahead of an “intense year” that will focus on technology such as artificial intelligence and smart glasses.
Meta joined Amazon and McDonald’s earlier this week in announcing it would roll back DEI initiatives, in advance of US president-elect Donald Trump returning to office later this month – a critic of “woke” DEI programmes.
Zuckerberg has also announced that Meta would stop using fact-checking teams at Facebook and bring in a Community Notes system similar to that on X (formerly Twitter).
Using performance management systems to identify tranches of under-performing employees for dismissal has come in for criticism in the past.
The so-called ‘rank and yank’ approach, made famous by General Electric chief executive Jack Welch in the 1980s, has fallen out of favour in recent years over concerns about it being too subjective and its negative impact on employee engagement.
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