One of Mark Zuckerberg’s main orders of business in Meta’s “year of efficiency” was to flatten the company’s corporate structure, leaving many middle managers expecting demotions.
Zuckerberg said last month that he didn’t want to see “managers managing managers” and added that a smaller management hierarchy would make Meta “a more fun place to work.”
Under Zuckerberg’s mandate to flatten the company, a second round of layoffs is expected soon, as Insider first reported.
Structural changes at Facebook — the largest part of Meta with nearly 40,000 employees — have been underway since the first round of layoffs at Meta in November. For those in the company that went through that round of cuts, some additional changes are planned to move managers out of roles.
A current employee told Insider that, in recent weeks, several managers at Facebook have been told they will be laying off their teams. These managers should be demoted and become an “individual contributor” to Facebook, the same type of role they supervise and manage.
“People with years of management experience are being told they have to train for a position they haven’t worked in for years,” the person told Insider. “Worse, it puts them in direct competition with the people they previously managed.”
Follow the lead on Instagram
While Zuckerberg’s mandate to flatten management layers is currently being worked on “and not yet finished,” according to a Meta spokesperson, Facebook’s organizational structure is set to look more like that of Instagram.
Meta (formerly Facebook) acquired Instagram in 2012. Over the years, there have been efforts to quickly grow Instagram and make it work more like Facebook. Yet the photo-sharing app remains “less bloated” than Facebook, as a former employee told Insider, which has nearly 20,000 employees. Facebook, meanwhile, has about 40,000 employees.
Facebook now operates according to a “matrix model,” a person familiar with the structure told Insider. The model is intended to encourage cross-collaboration by having multiple managers from different departments or regions manage the same project simultaneously.
In contrast, Instagram operates according to a more vertical model where employees are grouped according to their skills and report directly to a top manager or executive.
While the potential for collaboration is more limited in Instagram’s organizational model, it is increasingly considered a more efficient model because it allows decisions to be made more quickly.
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Contact Sydney Bradley at sbradley@insider.com yes on Twitter and Instagram @sydneykbradley.