Profile change
On employee loyalty, work culture, and the threat of big layoffs at enormous companies
Reuters claims to have exclusive reporting on a huge mass layoff at Meta (the name for what was once known solely as Facebook). The job cuts could include as many as 1 in 5 of the company’s current employees.
■ And it wouldn’t be the first big layoff at the company even just in recent memory. This raises a very significant question about the incentive structures being created. A company capable of separating from a fifth of its workforce without completely reinventing its core product or service is gambling hard that future talented employees will overlook the evident uncertainty about the job’s stability.
■ Employee loyalty may have been assumed, baked-in, and possibly even abused in many cases for quite some time. But if Meta goes through with these reported layoffs, it will send a rather loud and clear message that employee loyalty to anything but the very next paycheck isn’t valued much.
■ Reasons can always be found to explain why “this time it’s different”, but it almost never is. And if the signals are going into effect to say that pay checks alone rule over the employer-employee relationship, then we really have gone for a different balance than before. Company culture, a sense of mission, and unique work challenges all used to be factors that employers would tout as strengths worth applying to experience. They may have been overstated in the past, but surely they weren’t worth nothing.