Should you be here…?
Should you be here?
Dear Reader,
This post is a response to the recent July 26th article in The Verge regarding Mark Zuckerberg’s current answers to employee questions during town halls since Meta’s recent quarterly stock downturn.
https://www.theverge.com/23277797/mark-zuckerberg-meta-facebook-employees-pressure
For context, Meta, based out of Northern California, has 58,000+ employees stretched across the globe. The tech world is still reading Meta’s tea leaves, but significant challenges may lie ahead, such as:
Meta recently underwent a hiring freeze;
Meta is scaling back engineering hiring efforts by 30%;
Meta is no longer promoting from within their competitive internship program
Meta must continue to focus on building a robust AI for Reels (their answer to TikTok);
TikTok is “eating Meta’s lunch;”
Meta has an ongoing money pit project with Virtual Reality. A project that may not show as profit until 2030.
Stressful times.
My letter focus regards Zuckerberg’s recent leadership hiccups with his staff on June 30th. Reportedly, Zuckerberg, frustrated with current industry dynamics, shared with his team, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he said on the June 30th call. Furthermore, sharing that the company is raising expectations and will turn up the heat (and perhaps this isn’t the place (Meta) for perceived poorly performing employees).
Reportedly what transpired after Zuckerberg commented that Meta employees posted on internal boards about being in “War Time,” and is it acceptable that the staff can share lists of poorly performing colleagues? Meta troopers came out on blind forums equipped with harmful and toxic hyperbole. The “Meta haves” and the “Meta have-nots” started to draw lines in the sand.
Throughout my tech career, I have been rather lower-hanging fruit by being much more in the trenches. I reflect on how this type of communication may get internalized by fellow worker-bees who do not come from a tech-bro-barbaric molding, a prevalent mold in the 2010s. Zuckerberg comments instantly isolated countless staff members by simply sharing these suspicious words. Regardless of employee performance, employees who struggle with feelings of imposture syndrome or a lack of self-worth may have become isolated and now get to fear their own shadow. Zuckerberg set the precedence that fear is now the motivative driving force. I suspect that managers now struggle to form reflective and motivating responses.
A message of “riling the employee troops” was readily doable without toxic undercurrents. Simply implementing top-down messaging would allow managers to strategize how to motivate employees (and notify underperforming employees in private). What remains is just a thick fog of employees questioning if they should be there. Better yet, employees who lack product direction in a company with a damaged reputation knowingly struggle to find relevance with younger generations.
The tech industry is well known to be a well-paying sector that caters to employee work-life balance. However, I don’t believe a company needs to cuddle staff. Instead, there is a time for focused work, and employees must respect this dynamic. Such attentive and directed work may leave employees proud of the outcome. If executive management cannot apply these basic managerial level tactics — perhaps it’s time to question if executive leadership should be there.
Thanks for reading,
Christian
