Listen 6 minutes Comment on this story Leave a Comment Share a Gift Article Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to rally troops on Thursday after multiple layoffs that reduced the social media giant's workforce. According to a recording of the interview heard by The Washington Post, Zuckerberg told his employees during a company-wide meeting that he hoped the Facebook parent company would have more stability but less bureaucracy in the future. "Going through restructuring, layoffs and changes like that is clearly a very difficult thing," Zuckerberg said. "So we wouldn't be exactly where we were before because that wasn't my goal. I wanted to go somewhere more compact." Zuckerberg's comments closed a turbulent period for Meta. On Wednesday, the company began handing out the last round of pink slips in a months-long campaign to cut more than 10,000 roles and close 5,000 more vacancies. Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, reported job cuts to employees who were concentrated in the company's business segment, which includes teams working on advertising, human resources and policy initiatives. Article that speaks on condition of anonymity to discuss private events. A source said senior leaders have also begun announcing preliminary restructuring plans for their divisions. Meta human resources chief Lori Goler said on Thursday that the company laid off about 5,100 people in May. The company laid off its recruiters in March and then laid off nearly 4,000 among its technical teams in late April, The Washington Post reported. The latest layoffs add to November's workforce reduction, which destroyed nearly 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of Meta's workforce. Meta declined to comment. The layoffs at Meta come as the company struggles with a range of threats to its business model. Start-up apps like the short-form video network TikTok have intensified the competition among social media companies for their ad dollars and users. Broader challenges in the digital advertising industry, such as Apple's new privacy rules and a slowdown in the e-commerce market, have hurt Meta's case. Meanwhile, the company's long-term ambition to build immersive digital worlds known as the metaverse shows no immediate signs of bearing fruit. Zuckerberg has called 2023 the "productivity year" because the company is trying to relax a culture and management system used for easy money making and hyper workforce growth. Meta sought to reduce the number of layers of management between the interns and Zuckerberg. The company also withdrew some of its projects, such as some hardware devices and services, to support publishers. Zuckerberg told his employees on Thursday that one of the main goals of his productivity work is to transform Meta into "a stronger tech company that can produce better products faster." The second is about improving our financial performance so we can sustain our ambitious, long-term investments and vision in what I expect to be a challenging environment.” Zuckerberg said on Thursday that the company has no plans for another major company-wide layoff, but "the world is volatile, too." And in the future, the company plans to grow more slowly, which could mean smaller layoffs if Meta decides to shelve a project in favor of a new one. He added that having a lower head count would reduce Meta's bureaucracy and make it easier to get things done. "It just forces us to find ways to be more belligerent and do things more efficiently," Zuckerberg said. "This means there will be fewer environments or projects with too many cooks in the kitchen, which is a common complaint I've heard over and over across the entire company." Zuckerberg acknowledged that the business teams that were disproportionately affected by the disruptions were more diverse than the tech teams, meaning the representation of some demographics took a hit. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg told the laid-off workers in a private conversation that while he appreciated their valuable contributions to the company, their role is no longer critical in the company's modern future. "We're changing the composition of the company and forcing it to become more scrappy," he said, according to a recording of the interview heard by The Post. This push is not a "reflection on you or the work you do". The cuts, which affected about 10,600 people, made Meta's workforce uneasy. As employees' confidence in senior leadership and the direction of the company dwindles, there is an unprecedented morale crisis. Some have accused top executives of not investing better or making a hiring decision – they say the problems are partly causing the cuts. Others complained that the company made a mistake in planning the layoffs in a few months rather than a day. "I understand that layoffs are part of life, but this long process has been unbearable," one worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said in an interview. “There was a lot of uncertainty; no one was doing long-term work.” Wednesday's cuts were particularly worrying for those working on trust and safety issues, as they feared the layoffs would hamper the company's ability to respond to regulatory challenges, among other issues of viral political misinformation, foreign influence campaigns and other issues. On Thursday, Zuckerberg said he expects to unveil new guidelines on how and where employees will work as concerns about the outbreak have subsided. He said a "critical audience" who works together from the office at least a few days a week to improve performance and boost culture wants more. And the company plans to revive its internal culture by spending more time talking about its future innovations, including in part its investment in artificial intelligence. For example, the company has invested in AI infrastructure in the form of more capital expenditures than it spent on Reality Labs, the division that oversees metaverse betting, among other things. "We've really invested in building AI capacity because now we can bring all these different AI agents online [meanwhile] the rest of the industry is doing this crazy struggle for capacity," he said. "Talking about the future is not something leaders have been able to do in the past few months because we're just talking about productivity and layoffs," Zuckerberg said. GiftOutline Gift Article Gotopnews.com