Meta is expanding the ranks of its lowest-rated employees in their midyear performance reviews, months after it laid off nearly 4,000 employees whom it labeled low performers.
Meta is telling managers to put more employees in its “below expectations” tier, the lowest performance bucket, during this year’s midyear performance reviews, according to a memo shared on Meta’s internal forum on May 14, which was viewed by Business Insider. For teams of 150 or more, Meta wants managers to put 15% to 20% of employees in the bottom bucket compared with 12% to 15% last year.
The expanded range includes employees who have already left the company as part of “nonregrettable attrition,” Meta’s term for staff considered noncritical to operations, including those who resigned or were dismissed for underperformance.
The midyear performance review process is “an opportunity to make exit decisions,” the memo said. It added that “there will be no company-wide performance terminations, unlike earlier this year,” and that leaders are expected to manage the performance of their reports.
Managers can select employees for performance-based cuts based on criteria including a “Below Expectations” rating in their mid-year review, if they had a formal disciplinary action within the past six months, or if they had an “Employee Relations” (ER) case in the first quarter. An ER case means if an employee was on a plan to manage their performance.
The review process is set to begin on June 16, and conversations between managers and employees on performance will take place between July and August.
The change comes just months after Meta laid off nearly 4,000 employees — about 5% of its workforce — in performance-based cuts. Internal documents seen by BI earlier this year suggested such layoffs could become an annual fixture, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling staff he had “decided to raise the bar on performance management” and move faster to “move out low-performers.”
Meta did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
The new mid-year targets echo a similar move Meta made at the end of 2022, when it roughly doubled the share of employees placed in its lowest performance categories during annual reviews. At the time, managers were instructed to classify up to 16.5% of staff as underperformers, up from a previous range of 7% to 12%.
As with the current mid-year cycle, that figure included employees already marked for non-regrettable attrition. The company also warned managers to be more rigorous when evaluating employees on the borderline between performance tiers.
The repeated tightening of performance review criteria underscores Meta’s ongoing effort to reshape its workforce following years of overhiring. Meta executives have increasingly used performance management as a mechanism to streamline teams and cut costs. Meta’s HR leaders have emphasized the need to “move faster” in managing out underperformers so that new, stronger talent could be brought in.
Meta’s move mirrors a broader trend in the tech industry, where companies are sharpening their focus on performance while doubling down on AI investments. Earlier this month, Microsoft said it would cut around 6,000 roles—roughly 3% of its global workforce in an effort to trim layers of middle management and boost the ratio of coders to noncoders on projects. At Google, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees late last year that the company had reduced its top management ranks by 10% as part of an ongoing push for efficiency.
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