Meta is done being nice to underperformers — and takes a page from Amazon's management playbook

• Meta is adopting a more aggressive approach to workforce management.
• This shift marks a departure from Silicon Valley's traditional talent retention strategy.
• Tech firms now prioritize lean teams over retaining talent to prevent competition gains.

Meta is adopting a more performance-focused approach to workforce management, one that Amazon embraced years ago: systematically pushing out under-performers to maintain lean, high-performing teams.

This week, Meta announced internally that it plans to cut 5% of its lowest-performing employees, a first for the social media giant, as part of a border strategy to "raise the bar" according to a memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This stance mirrors Amazon's longstanding philosophy of maintaining strict annual turnover targets known as unregretted attrition (URA). Amazon managers are expected to regularly shed a set percentage of employees deemed dispensable. Even Andy Jassy, the company's CEO, has had a URA target in the past to replace 6% of his team annually, Business Insider reported.

"The overarching trend is that corporations feel they have more power over their employees," Laszlo Bock, who oversaw the tremendous growth in Google's workforce as the company's head of people operations from 2006 to 2016, told BI. "The current political environment emboldens these CEOs to take drastic actions."

Donald Trump was reelected US President in November and tech companies, which had championed progressive workplace policies and employee-friendly initiatives in 2016, are now taking a markedly different approach, Bock added.

The shift in how Meta manages employees marks a significant departure from Silicon Valley's traditional talent strategy. Leading tech companies notoriously overpaid for talent for years — even those workers who were not fully productive — to keep them away from competitors.

"Their business model thrived on tremendous margins, so they hired freely, knowing that if some employees underperformed, at least they weren't boosting the competition," Bock explained.

That line of thinking seems to have changed.

Weeding out underperformers

At Meta, managers have been instructed to identify under-performers through a tiered rating system, according to a memo from Hillary Champion, Meta's director of people development growth programs seen by BI.

Last week BI reported that Microsoft is also planning to make performance-based job cuts.

"At Microsoft we focus on high performance talent," a spokesperson previously told BI. "We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action."

Google, too, had its own version of performance culling under Bock's leadership that the company kept secret.

Every quarter, the company identified the bottom 5% of employees in any group of at least 200 people (such as a division), combining smaller teams until they hit that threshold, a process that was separate from regular performance reviews, Bock told BI.

He said some of these people were still good performers. "If your worst person is better than my best person, you're still going to have a bottom 5%," he said. Google then coached, transferred, or terminated these workers. Google did not respond to a request for comment from BI and Meta declined to comment on this report.

Today's tech CEOs, however, are taking a more direct approach.

"Everyone at these companies still gets performance ratings and goes through the motions," Bock said, "But, I think the CEOs are seeing an opportunity in the marketplace and the political environment and saying 'We're just going to pull the bandaid off.' They feel employees are entitled."

The message is clear: If you're not building the future, you might just be history.

If you're a current or former Meta employee, contact this reporter from a nonwork device securely on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at pranavdixit@protonmail.com.