Thousands of Meta employee performance evaluations failed, or heralds more layoffs

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META) gave thousands of employees substandard ratings in a recently concluded round of performance reviews, a signal that more layoffs are likely, people familiar with the matter said.

The company also dropped a bonus metric, one of several that executives are taking after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be “the year of efficiency,” the people said. One of the measures.

Meta leadership expects the performance rating to lead to more employee departures in the coming weeks, the people said. If the number of departures is insufficient, the company will consider a new round of layoffs, the person said. The company recently laid off about 11,000 workers, about 13% of its workforce.

Meta managers gave nearly 10 percent of their employees a grade that indicated they were underperforming, the people said. Such proportions were not unprecedented in the years before the pandemic. But from 2019 to 2022, Meta’s workforce nearly doubled to 86,400, with about half of those workers never going through the company’s typical performance review cycle, several people familiar with the matter said.