From my posts, you can extrapolate that I am a fan of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s Meta. But today, he surprised me. Yes, he went all over the world telling people that he would fire “low-performers” in his company. I mean Meta has all the rights to fire people, but trumpeting these “low performers” is totally unfortunate.
Meta began layoffs this week with the aim of eliminating low-performers, but several employees who were let go told Business Insider they were “blindsided,” saying they had received positive midyear reviews. Some voiced concerns about future job opportunities, given the layoffs were publicized as targeting underperformers. However, internal documents viewed by BI showed that higher performing employees would also be targeted if managers couldn’t meet workforce reduction goals with lower performers alone. – LinkedIn News
Sure – you can say “what is this village boy finding fault with how a billionaire runs his empire?” No issues. But even as billionaires, they need to think and care about people. These workers which have been tagged as “low performers” are possibly going to struggle to find new jobs because everyone now knows why Mark fired them. Typically, he could have framed this as restructuring because whatever metric he used to classify people as “low performer” is not physics! Yes, some were performing well even in Meta!
One of the things I learnt from the beloved Diamond Bank was that people could be great but the wrong job function could make them underperform. I saw how people who struggled in operations did very well when re-posted to marketing. Under the bank’s founder, the bank did not fire people anyhow, but reposted people for alignments. I knew of a lady who struggled in the treasury unit but who became a star marketer when reposted to a branch. Some workers struggled in Lagos but when reposted to outside Lagos, they did well.
So, saying that someone is a “low performer” and trumpeting it to the whole world as you fire him or her is not not fair.
A round of layoffs affecting about 3,600 workers is underway at Meta, with some affected employees receiving emails early Monday, Business Insider reports, citing anonymous sources. Meta had said in January that the redundancy would affect 5% of its workforce and target low performers, prompting speculation that the staffers might not receive severance. However, U.S. employees will receive at least 16 weeks’ salary, Bloomberg reports, also anonymously. Per USA Today, Meta will replace laid-off employees with machine learning engineers. – LinkedIn News
