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Meta has instructed managers to rank more employees in its “Below Expectations” performance rating.
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The mid-year reviews could set the stage for more performance-based cuts.
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The move follows CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to “move out low-performers” faster.
Meta is expanding the ranks of its lowest-rated employees in mid-year performance reviews, months after it laid off nearly 4,000 employees and labeled them low performers.
Meta is telling managers to put more employees in “Below Expectations”, the lowest performance bucket during this year’s mid-year 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 15-20% of employees in the bottom bucket compared to 12-15% last year.
The expanded range includes employees who have already left the company as part of “non-regrettable attrition”, Meta’s term for staff considered non-critical to operations, including those who resigned or were dismissed for underperformance.
The mid-year performance review process is “an opportunity to make exit decisions”, according to the memo. It added that “there will be no company-wide performance terminations, unlike earlier this year,” and 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 manager 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%.
