Mark Zuckerberg braces Meta employees for ‘intense period’

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Mark was trying to make the meeting seem urgent by staring into his webcams.

He used to personally address employees at a weekly Q&A. The sessions became more scripted as the company grew. He stopped showing up because he allowed other executives to field the most upvoted questions.

It was back on June 30th. He sounded like he was preparing his troops for battle. He was the visionary, hyping where the company could take it over the next decade.

He was just annoyed.

The first pre recorded employee question began. Gary is in Chicago. Meta days are extra days off introduced during the Pandemic.

The billionaire appeared upset. He stuttered and said, "Um... all right." He said that the economy was going to be one of the worst downturns he had seen. He had already stopped hiring in many places. It took over a year and a half for TikTok to overtake it.

Gary asked about extra vacation days.

You can imagine what my reaction would be given my tone in the rest of the Q&A. There were no Meta days after this year.

The company he founded 18 years ago was facing a lot of threats. The two social media sites were being re-architected to compete with each other. The company lost billions of dollars in revenue because of Apple's privacy settings in the mobile device operating system. He didn't see turning a profit on the metaverse until at least the end of the decade.

Gary hails from Chicago. It was clear that fixing his company's culture was important to surviving the tough times ahead. His company was in a more vulnerable place after two years of the Pandemic. A new name was given to it.

Employees would no longer be allowed to be coddling.

There are probably a lot of people at the company who shouldn't be there, according to a recording of the call. Some of you might just say that this place isn't for you because of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals. That self-selecting is fine with me.

The company has a version of Facebook for employees. One wrote that they needed a war-time CEO. A second employee said thatbeast mode activated.

Some people couldn't believe what they'd heard. A staffer asked if Mark had said there were a bunch of people at the company that weren't welcome. Someone asked who hired them.

If a corporate all-hands meeting exists to rally troops, it would be more divisive. The promise of transparency was fulfilled, as his employees now understand how he feels about them.

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales and Alex Castro / Sculpture: Okamoto Studio Custom Ice / Concept: Kristen Radtke

Exceeds expectations

Tech companies made a lot of money during the Pandemic. Tech was well suited for remote work. The Facebook founder leaned in. He said in May 2020 that they would be the most forward-leaning company on remote work.

Facebook gave everyone a $1,000 cash bonus when it suspended its performance-review process that determines bonuses for half of the year. By June of 2021. At the same time, the company embarked on a massive hiring spree, increasing its number of full-time employees by 62 percent.

During the June 30th call, parts of which were previously reported by The New York Times and The New York Times, it was clear that his company was becoming too soft. It was time for a new way of working.

He said that he biases towards more flexibility and convenience for people. People making appointments in the middle of the day makes it hard for the CEO to get everyone to attend a meeting.

He said that the right way to bias is to try to make the decision today, not next week. Employees were told to be available for meetings during the day.

It wasn't just their schedules that needed to be adjusted. In an effort to be cost-conscious, he slashed engineer-hiring plans by 30 percent and froze or reduced staffing for low-priority projects. Employees should expect to be moved to top initiatives like Reels, the company's answer to TikTok, and building products for augmented and virtual reality.

Meta's head of HR wrote in a follow up post that this is a time when moving fast really matters. She said that leaders were being asked to solve issues that were slowing teams down.

In 2012 Facebook went public and rode the longest US stock market bull of all time. The company's valuation surpassed $1 trillion for the first time when interest rates were lowered. It changed its name to Meta just a few months before its stock price plummeted. There are other people who are sounding the alarm about worse times to come.

In a message to staff two weeks ago, Pichai warned that they would have to work with more hunger than they have shown. Last week, the company told investors that it wasn't satisfied with the results it was delivering. Meta believes that TikTok is its biggest threat in social media. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, has slowed hiring.

Meta is in a unique position. The new emphasis of the rebrand was on the idea of a maximalist, 3D version of the internet lifted from the pages of Snow Crash and Ready Player One. The kind of augmented reality glasses that he thinks could one day replace phones is still years away.

There have been signs for months that Meta's current business isn't going well. Apple got the biggest hit. The feature that allows users to opt out of cross-app tracking was introduced by the iPhone maker. It may seem small, but that single move by Apple has ruined Facebook's ad business, which relies on combining data from different companies to personalize ads The $10 billion in lost ad revenue was caused by people asking "Ask app not to track" on Facebook and Instagram.

In conversations with current and former employees over the past few weeks, the consensus is that internal morale has been hit harder than in the past The stock price was unaffected by the company's history of bad press. When Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its history, Meta's share price plummeted. Its stock price has plummeted from a year ago.

A lot of employee compensation is determined by the stock they receive. Thousands of Meta employees are making less than they did on their first day of work.

In a recent internal employee survey that the company takes seriously, only 39 percent of respondents said they felt optimistic about the company's future. Only 42 percent of people said they were confident in leadership. The numbers are the lowest of their kind. 77 percent of people said they would recommend working at the company.

According to the results of the employee survey, there is a lot of anxiety about Meta's direction because of the economy. There's some certainty about our vision, as well as concerns about stock fluctuations and the rapid shifts in priorities and hiring, according to a summary obtained by The.

The second most upvoted question on the day was about compensation. One staffer wrote that it seemed like other companies were giving their employees compensation for the stock dip. Will Meta compensate in the same way?

At the beginning of the year, compensation is evaluated, and that wasn't going to change, despite the fact that he personally sold over $4 billion in stock last year.

He said that it can be difficult when there is a lot of volatility. I want the teams to work on the things that we need to ship right now. He said that layoffs weren't planned, but they also weren't ruled out.

A company that wants to have a lasting impact must practice disciplined prioritization and work with a high level of intensity. The reports about these efforts are in line with what we have already said about our operating style.

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales and Alex Castro / Sculpture: Okamoto Studio Custom Ice / Concept: Kristen Radtke

Coast, Coasters, Me

Immediately after the all-hands, one question took hold in the minds of employees, who exactly are the people who don't belong here?

One employee wrote on workplace that they don't see people slacking. I see people who work hard. Hearing that some of you don't belong here from a leader is a bit different. It is disappointing and may not be the best way to get this point across.

When an engineering executive at the company told managers that they needed to identify people on their team who need support by 5PM the next day, it became clear what Zuckerberg meant.

He said in an internal post that if a direct report is coasting or a low performer, they are not who we need. You can't allow someone to be neutral for Meta.

One employee said that coasters know they are coasting. They have gloated on Blind about resting and not doing real work. They are aware that they are exploiting the company for their own gain. The people are not you.

There was a meme of the term in no time. "Coast, Coasters, Me" is a take on Meta's "Meta, Metamates, Me" slogan. The walls of Meta's headquarters were mocked up with posters that asked "Should you be here?" in bold, all-caps red letters. A picture of a man holding a flag while hydrofoiling on a lake was captioned by an employee.

Many of the jokes posted in the workplace group called "Shitposting@ Meta" masked an underlying uneasiness. Employees were debating if satisfactory ratings in their performance reviews were enough to make them a coasters. One asked where to submit names.

Things got worse when it was learned that the company wouldn't be hiring any interns at the end of their internship program. Meta has historically been a crucial source of junior hires. The decision was made as a result of the hiring slowdown.

The employees were angry. One wondered if there was any other way to motivate interns. One person said that their intern spent her entire internship from her daughter. The decision to cut interns was seen as a bad sign by another.

One of the company's best ways of finding young, motivated talent was hurt by not extending offers to interns. There isn't a large pool of exceptional candidates who want to join Meta and replace people who don't belong here. It is inevitable that expectations will have to come down if the company continues to grow, unless there is some radical change that will make Meta the cool place to work.

Take more pain

Diminished expectations are a death knell according to the man. He sees the next two years as a turning point for the company, with its pivot to entertainment content with Reels, the artificial intelligence work that needs to be done to make its recommendations as good as TikTok's, and rebuilding how its ads work to use less data He has said that he won't be profitable until at least the end of the decade.

He said that the next 18 to 24 months would be intense. It could be a little bit longer.

It's unusual for a CEO to weather tough periods. Thanks to his supervoting shares, the 38 year old still has total control over the company. He can't be taken away. When Facebook barely survived the shift to mobile phones, he emerged victorious.

He wants to reinforce that authority. The HR department is one of the teams that has been brought under his direct supervision. He has put his trusted lieutenants in top positions.

He told employees that they could either reduce funding or take more pain. It is more difficult for me to slow down the progress that we are making than it is to have a short-term difficult period.

His bet is that the future he is inventing is so attractive that it will be worth the fight over the next couple of years. The company is concerned that he may be wrong. Without that ever-growing stock price to keep employees happy in the present, they appear to be further apart than ever. Even as he tries to rebuild his business, he may need to rebuild the company's culture.

It will be the biggest challenge in the company's history. The man is ready for it. It isn't clear if the rest of Meta will be as well.