Meta adopts the Amazon management manual

• Meta is taking a more aggressive approach to workforce management.
• This change marks a departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional talent retention strategy.
• Tech companies are now prioritizing smaller teams over talent retention to avoid competitive gains.

Meta takes a more performance-driven approach to workforce management, one that Amazon took years ago: systematically eliminating underperformers to maintain lean, high-performing teams.

This week, Meta internally announced plans to cut 5% of its lowest-performing employees, a first for the social media giant, as part of a border strategy aimed at “raising the bar,” according to a memo from the CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This position reflects Amazon’s long-standing philosophy of maintaining strict annual turnover targets known as unregretted attrition (URA). Amazon executives are expected to regularly lay off a certain percentage of employees deemed superfluous. Even Andy Jassy, ​​the company’s CEO, had a URA target in the past to replace 6% of its team per year, Business Insider reported.

“The general trend is that companies feel like they have more power over their employees,” Laszlo Bock, who oversaw Google’s tremendous headcount growth as head of the company’s people operations, told BI from 2006 to 2016. “The current political environment encourages these CEOs to take drastic action.”

Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States in November, and tech companies, which had championed progressive workplace policies and employee-friendly initiatives in 2016, are now taking a noticeably different approach, Bock added.

The shift in how Meta manages employees marks a significant departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional talent strategy. Leading technology companies notoriously overpaid for years for talent – ​​even for workers who were not fully productive – in order to keep them away from their competitors.

“Their business model thrived on huge margins, so they hired freely, knowing that if some employees were underperforming, at least they weren’t driving competition,” Bock explained.

This way of thinking seems to have changed.

Eliminate underperformers

At Meta, managers were tasked with identifying underperformers through a tiered rating system, according to a memo from Hillary Champion, Meta’s director of people development programs seen by BI.

Last week, BI announced that Microsoft also plans to cut jobs based on performance.

“At Microsoft, we focus on high-performing talent,” a spokesperson told BI. “We always strive to help people learn and grow. When people are not performing well, we take appropriate action.”

Google also had its own version of the performance cull under Bock’s leadership, which the company kept secret.

Each quarter, the company identified the lowest 5% of employees in any group of at least 200 people (such as a division), combining smaller teams until they reached that threshold, a process separate from regular performance reviews, Bock told BI.

He said some of these people were still good students. “If your worst person is better than my best person, you will always have the poorest 5%,” he said. Google then coached, transferred or fired these workers. Google did not respond to a request for comment from BI and Meta declined to comment for this report.

Today’s tech CEOs, however, are taking a more direct approach.

“Everyone at these companies is always getting performance ratings and going through the motions,” Bock said. “But I think CEOs see an opportunity in the market and in the political environment and say ‘We’ll just rip off the Band-Aid.’ .’ They believe that employees are entitled to it. »

The message is clear: if you don’t build the future, you could well become 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 send him an email to pranavdixit@protonmail.com.