The invention of a new word at Meta (Facebook) has left employees bemused as Nick Clegg’s journey up the greasy pole reaches new heights. Meanwhile, research casts light on how often we send our messages to unintended recipients. Once again our Friday round-up gently pokes fun at HR- related news and issues.
Mark Zuckerberg’s experiences this week are a reminder that attempting to adjust company culture by playing with words can open the door to mockery.
Old timers at Personnel Today can remember the days when they were subject to “boundarylessness”. The use of the previously unknown term succeeded in providing fertile grounds for humour between departments, if not the intended cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Perhaps laughter is what Meta needed, which is what Zuckerberg delivered when telling his employees to call each other “Metamates”. For “Metamates” have replaced “Facebookers” in the sinister sounding Metaverse which encompasses Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
“Now is the right time to update our values and our cultural operating system,” Zuckerberg wrote, after announcing the change during a company-wide staff meeting earlier this week.
Twitter responses from Meta employees and others, much to that company’s delight no doubt, were swift. “Metamates report to the Metatorium for a Metameeting,” one wrote.
A lighthearted take on HR
Another Twitter user joked they were eating “lunchables with my metamates.”
“Metamates? More like metastases,” quipped another user on social media, rather tastelessly.
Others referenced the Mates condom brand as they mocked the new word.
Andrew Bosworth, chief technological officer at Meta’s Facebook division, tweeted that Metamates was a reference to a naval phrase which Instagram has used for a while: Ship, Shipmates, Self.
According to the New York Times one of his colleagues replied online: “Does this mean we are on a sinking ship?”
Zuckerberg has insisted, “Meta, Metamates, Me is about being good stewards of our company and mission.”
“It’s about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It’s about taking care of our company and each other.”
And if it’s given the employees a good laugh, then why not?
Of course, some Metamates are more meta than others. And Nick Clegg is now on the top rank of metadom. He’s been promoted to chief of global affairs, and will lead the company on all policy matters including how it interacts with governments “as they consider adopting new policies and regulations”. Clegg’s former role as deputy prime minister might sound impressive to some but now he has power that even the loftiest world leaders have to take account of. A useful mate to have. A penny for David Cameron’s thoughts.
‘Oh no, who did I just send that email to?’
With so much social media chatter going on in the new hybrid working world, it’s unsurprising that mocking and derogatory chats, texts and emails often are misdirected, and seen by the very people they are about. Even Metamates might fall out after such errors.
Few misdirected communications are as embarrassing as the somewhat graphic one which Roman Roy sent to his father in the final series of Succession, but nonetheless such face-reddening incidents are widespread. Telecoms firm TollFree Forwarding’s research suggests 56% of workers have made this mistake.
Most errors occur on email, TollFree claims, with 34% of respondents saying they’d sent one to the wrong person. Texts or instant messages were also found to be regularly sent to the wrong person at work – more than one in five (22%) said they’d done it at some point during their working life.
Few female readers will register surprise on learning that men are more careless than women in their office communications. About 70% said they’d miscommunicated in some way in the workplace (compared with 49% for women). More than a quarter of men have accidentally sent insulting comments about a colleague to someone at work. This applied to only 15% of the women surveyed.
One in 10 were even found to have inadvertently sent sexual content to a colleague it wasn’t intended for, thus risking dismissal. A highly surprising figure to my mind; I suspect TollFree may have researched some spectacularly uninitiated individuals, even for men. It would be hard to imagine Mark Zuckerberg’s employees performing so poorly, now that they’re Metamates.
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