- Meta is adopting a more aggressive approach to workforce management.
- This change marks a departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional talent retention strategy.
- Tech firms now prioritize lean teams over talent retention to prevent competitive gains.
Meta is adopting a more performance-focused approach to workforce management, one that Amazon embraced years ago: systematically boosting underperformers to retain lean, high-performing teams.
This week, Meta announced internally that it plans to cut 5% of its lowest-performing employees, a first for the social media giant, as part of a border strategy to “raise the bar” according to a memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg .
This stance reflects Amazon’s longstanding philosophy of maintaining strict annual turnover targets known as unrepentant consumption (URA). Amazon managers are expected to regularly cut a certain percentage of employees who are deemed irreplaceable. Even Andy Jassy, CEO of the company, has had a URA target in the past to replace 6% of its team annually, Business Insider reported.
“The main trend is that corporations feel they have more power over their employees,” Laszlo Bock, who oversaw the extraordinary growth of Google’s workforce as the company’s head of people operations from 2006 to 2016, told BI. The current political environment encourages these CEOs to take drastic action.”
Donald Trump was re-elected US President in November, and tech companies, which had championed progressive workplace policies and employee-friendly initiatives in 2016, are now taking a markedly different approach, Bock added.
The change in how Meta manages employees marks a significant departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional talent strategy. Major technology companies overpaid for talent for years – even those workers who were not fully productive – to keep them away from competitors.
“Their business model thrived on tremendous margins, so they hired freely, knowing that if some employees underperformed, at least they weren’t outgrowing the competition,” Bock explained.
That line of thinking seems to have changed.
Firing poor performers
At Meta, managers are instructed to identify underperformers through a tiered rating system, according to a memo from Hillary Champion, Meta’s director of BI-first people development growth programs.
Last week BI reported that Microsoft is also planning to make performance-based job cuts.
“At Microsoft we focus on high-performing talent,” a spokesperson previously told BI. “We’re always working to help people learn and grow. When people don’t perform, we take appropriate action.”
Google, too, had its own version of performance annihilation under Bock’s leadership that the company kept secret.
Each quarter, the company identified the bottom 5% of employees in each group of at least 200 people (such as a division), combining smaller teams until they reached that threshold, a process that was separate from reviews regular performance, Bock told BI.
He said some of these people were still good performers. “If your worst person is better than my best person, you’re still going to be 5% lower,” he said. Google then trained, transferred or terminated these workers. Google did not respond to a request for comment from BI, and Meta declined to comment for this report.
Today’s technology leaders, however, are taking a more direct approach.
“Everybody in these companies still gets performance reviews and goes through the motions,” Bock said, “But I think CEOs are seeing an opportunity in the market and the political environment and saying, ‘We’re just going to take the bandaid off.'” .’ They think that the employees have the right”.
The message is clear: if you’re not building the future, you might just be history.
If you are a current or former Meta employee, contact this reporter from a non-work device securely on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at pranavdixit@protonmail.com.
