Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews that could clear the way for more layoffs during its ‘Year of Efficiency’

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has reportedly ranked thousands of employees as “subpar” in a recent wave of performance reviews. And that’s raising fears among workers that more belt-tightening is on the way.

Those concerns come after CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 a “year of efficiency” at the company on an earnings call at the beginning of February. Meta also did away with a bonus metric, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Managers gave about 10% of the company’s workers poor reviews. It is, in some ways, a return to Meta’s pre-pandemic review process, where Zuckerberg was said to be less than gentle with his assessments of workers.

The threat of additional layoffs comes just days after the company delayed finalizing budgets. Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post earlier this month, wrote “We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster, as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive. As part of this, we’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial.”

Seemingly safe from the cuts is Meta’s metaverse division. While Horizon Worlds has failed to engage users, including some who work at the company, and the Reality Labs division was responsible for $13.7 billion in losses last year, Zuckerberg remains committed to it.

Other divisions do not seem to have that protected status.

“We closed last year with some difficult layoffs and restructuring some teams.,” Zuckerberg said in his post. “When we did this, I said clearly that this was the beginning of our focus on efficiency and not the end.”