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- Mark Zuckerberg issued a mandate to flatten Meta's structure as part its "year of efficiency"
- Facebook, the oldest and largest Meta platforms, is set to be reorganized to look more like Instagram.
- Managers are being told to expect demotions, putting them in "direct competition" with reports.
One of Mark Zuckerberg's top orders of business in Meta's "year of efficiency" is to flatten the company's corporate structure, leaving many middle managers expecting demotions.
Zuckerberg said last month that he doesn't want to see "managers managing managers" and even added that a less managerial hierarchy will make Meta "a more fun place to work."
Under Zuckerberg's mandate to flatten the company, a second round of layoffs are expected soon, as Insider first reported.
Changes to Facebook's structure — the largest segment at Meta with almost 40,000 employees — have been underway since Meta's first round of layoffs in November. For those at the company who made it through that round of cuts, some further changes are being planned to move managers out of those roles.
A current employee told Insider that, in recent weeks many managers at Facebook have been told they will have their teams taken away. These managers are essentially set to be demoted and become an "individual contributor" at Facebook, the same type of role they've been overseeing and managing.
"Folks with years of management experience are being told they have to train on a position they haven't done in years," the person told Insider. "Worse, it's putting them in direct competition with the people they were once managing."
Following Instagram's lead
While Zuckerberg's mandate to flatten layers of management is being worked on now "and has not been finalized," according to a Meta spokesperson, the organizational structure of Facebook is set to look a lot more like that at Instagram.
Meta (then Facebook) acquired Instagram in 2012. For years, there were efforts to grow Instagram quickly and in a way that made it operate more like Facebook. Yet the photo-sharing app remained "less bloated" than Facebook, as one former employee told Insider, with roughly 20,000 employees. Facebook, meanwhile, has about 40,000 employees.
Facebook currently operates according to a "matrix model," one person familiar with the structure told Insider. The model is intended to encourage cross-collaboration by having multiple managers from various departments or regions oversee the same project simultaneously.
By contrast, Instagram operates according to a more vertical model where employees are grouped according to their expertise and report directly to a top manager or executive.
While the potential for collaboration is more limited in Instagram's organizational model, it's increasingly considered a more efficient model because it allows decisions to be made more swiftly.
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Contact Sydney Bradley at sbradley@insider.com or or on Twitter and Instagram @sydneykbradley.