Things can only get Meta, mate
Zuckerberg is trying to convince employees that the future is both virtual and rosy. Problem is, the latest noises from the company makes it seem like they come last in his thinking…
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In 2018, if you were a full-time Facebook employee life probably seemed pretty sweet.*
Yes, your employer had just been embroiled in an almost-90million person data collection scandal, that tied it to the dodgy election-gaming dealings of Cambridge Analytica (who had clear links to Trump, and other associated ‘baddies’). Yes, as a result, your boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had been hauled in front of Congress for a grilling. And, yes, Cher had deleted her account but, like, so what?
Company coffers were still bulging - with yearly revenue outstripping analyst predictions - user growth was was still in the double digits, and your core product, Facebook, was the social network with the most amount of people actively using it each month. Even future competitors, like the addictive, Gen Z-beloved TikTok, didn’t exist as it did right now. And, as Zuckerberg struggled to explain to US lawmakers that year, he just didn’t know who it was that was competing with the company for market share. In employee terms: your jobs probably safe, you’re doing well, and here’s, likely, a whopping bonus for your efforts.
To top it off, average Facebook wages at the time were near enough £100,000 - and that’s before considering a whole raft of highly-desirable perks and benefits such as an (extremely) extended parental leave offering, egg freezing, free meals, on-site dental and healthcare as well as grooming services, and things like on-campus bike repairs - and King Zuck’s hearts-and-minds campaign, he visited every US state in 2017, was a PR move that had him linked to a potential Presidential run. Plus he still seemed fairly normal when papped in photos. Less plastering himself in suncream and going surfboarding and more feeding calves milk. It’s nice to work for a person who’s great, isn’t it!?
If that wasn’t enough, Facebook was deemed the literal best place to work by Glassdoor, the anonymous, and pretty well trusted, workplace review platform, with Zuckerlord deemed to be inside the world’s top 20 CEOs (with a staggering 96% of employees approving of what he was doing). Even their diversity and inclusion figures seemed to be on the up. And they had a Chief Diversity Officer which, to be fair, is about ten years ahead of the curve for most other companies of their size and brand cut-through.
It then gets Meta - but doesn’t get better
Fast forward to 2021 and that sweet employee-Zuckerberg love appears to have disappeared.
Meta, as Facebook is now known, sits 47th on 2022’s version of the above mentioned best place to work list. A staggering falloff. And in the top CEO rankings: Chief Executive Zuck doesn’t even make the uppermost 100. In fact, at the latest measure in 2021, his employee approval rating has dropped almost 10 percentage points from 2018’s peak.
That drop in employee love appears to be reciprocated by the onetime Harvard dropout. Perhaps the most telling clue that the doe-eyed tryst between Beloved Zuckerberg and his underlings is over was Zuck Daddy’s very explicit ‘I’m just not that into you’ message, delivered to all of his staff at a Tuesday meeting, where he laid out his new corporate values - which included, in worketc’s view, a tacit admission of where he thought his near 70,000 employees factored into his hierarchy of needs and plans.
Whilst ontologists are probably still scratching their heads at some of the corporate values updates that the newly future-oriented Zuck announced earlier this week - the call, depending on how cynical you are, was either a chance to better align, at least in words, some of the companies mechanisms, values and motors to 2021’s surprise announcement that the Silicon Valley giant was now a metaverse-first company, rather than a social media-first advertising behemoth; or, if you’re a cynic, a vague pitch to keyed-in shareholders, some of whom will have been involved in a recent record share selloff, that although The Zuck was spunking billions into his virtual reality project obsession, a virtual reality project obsession which holds no promise it can/will deliver on anything from profit to social benefit, and although Meta’s core product is losing users, and although Apple, Google and TikTok were now serious threats to Meta’s own data collection and monetisation abilities, they must stay the course - such as changing statements like ‘be bold’ and ‘focus on impact’ to ‘focus on long-term impact’ and ‘live in the future’, employees might be also feeling a bit stumped by what he’s now calling them and where they fit in his thinking.
This is because the company’s new motto - the words Chief Zuck of Meta wants his employees to abide and work by - ‘Meta, Metamates, Me’ seems to put those employees, well, last. Though Meta won’t be the first company to be fairly explicit about this - a quick search of any job site will share almost endless job descriptions that are up front about their wish for employees to genuflect at any time of day or night and get rid of any ideas about having a life outside of work - and he won’t be the first executive to be accused of not prioritising the workforce, it does seem a fairly odd move. Especially when we consider the need for the Meta executive to get workforce buy-in for a project that is already beset by doubt and governance questions, when the employee-employer has been changed so drastically by the pandemic that, depending on where you get your stats, up to three-quarters of us are planning to quit our jobs in 2022 as part of the so-called Great Resignation+, and that Silicon Valley has already lost a lot of its early years, panglossian lustre - thanks to a litany of scandals involving everything from associated corporate wrongdoing, to ingrained issues with working practises and culture; and louder questions about the monopoly certain companies enjoy, as well as their social benefit - so you can’t just expect buy-in, something that is surely acutely obvious when more of Meta’s own employee base are measurably less-than-happy with life at the firm.
The swashbuckling Metamates on the virtual high seas
In fact, the move has sparked a lot of commentary - partly expected, it is Meta after all. A lot of this analysis has focussed on the new portmanteau ‘Metamates’ - portmanteau being a fancy word for smushing two words together to form a new word; use that on yer Friday date! - which some critics say can come across as a bit tone deaf in a world in which many employees are actively restructuring or reassessing their own relationship to work, and in fact don’t want to be tied to it so much i.e. they just want to be plain workers, no weird made-up-words as names that supposedly showcase clubbiness.
In fact, when it is well reported that many traditional white collar workers are trying to get more purpose, identity and satisfaction from outside of work activities, Fortune reports that cutesy nicknames for employees, though traditionally popular in Silicon Valley, can land rather flat. At best they show a working culture that is straining to be more collegiate and familial than it really is, or than employees want it to be; at worst, it leaves the company open for a serious PR-lived experience disconnect. Consider Amazon’s use of the Amazonian moniker for employees. Few warehouse workers likely feel they are mythical warriors when working shifts under horrendous, demeaning conditions.
Other criticism of this values update has focussed on the order of the words: Meta, Metamates, Me. It’s a motto that originated from Douglas Hoftstadter, Professor of Cognitive Science at Inidana University, when a fan of his, who worked at the metaverse company, reached out for help with creating a phrase that would concisely capture what the new brand thought it ought to stand for. Though Hofstadter claims that he preferred teammates, as opposed to metamates, it’s not too dissimilar from the logo at another Meta company; Instagram uses ‘Ship, Shipmates, Self’ as its motto. Something which puts the ‘Shipmate’, or Instagram employee, last.
Doomed voyage
Because of that order, many media critics don’t think this new motto will cut through and create the togetherness, or bestow the mission-clarifying effect, or mission buy-in effect, that those who signed off on its use may wish it would have. Even those trying to understand the logic of the Meta’s new motto-come-hierarchy-of-parts, such as commentator Mark Gongloff, Opinion Editor at Bloomberg, couldn’t quite get past it all ending in tears. In a recent piece, Gongloff opined that this new motto might be an attempt to get employees, or crew, to rally around the ‘mast’, or Meta, as they go on a swashbuckling - and, yes, uncertain - adventure into a prophesied virtual future, like an avatar iteration of the crews of Captain James Cook or the fictional Captain Ahab. But we all know how they turned out: not well.
Others are a bit less literary in their criticism - focussing more on what individuals have come to expect, in 2022, from the organisations they work for. Nowadays, good employers understand that they can’t get away with - at least in engagement, retention, and attraction stakes - explicitly saying that the employee comes last, with the needs of the business getting primacy. It’s for this reason that the forbearer of the new Meta motto - the Ship, Shipmates, Self ordinal - has received criticism in seafaring circles. As quoted in the Independent, Jimmy Drennan, vice president of the think tank Centre for International Maritime Security, has argued it is an outdated framework that needs to be updated as three "all equally important, interrelated elements".
Meta, Metarer and Metarerer or Dumb, Dumber and Dumberest
In fact, by extending the Drennan logic a little further, and using it as a tool to pick apart the new apparent lodestar of how to work, and expect care, at Meta, we can unpack a picture of, well, a company that have come up a fairly dumb construct of ordering employment as it is in Menlo Park (or whatever remote setting Meta employees now undertake their efforts from).
Meta, if we speak truthfully, as the virtual reality universe that dominates internet connection and commerce, doesn’t exist. It may never do. Currently, it’s a Zuckerberg pipedream that he’s trying to spend, speak and code into existence. And he may just do that. He certainly has a seeming current cash pile and expertise pool to be able to get us all to his desired future through sheer dint of resource alone.
But in order to arrive there he also has to get both shareholders and employees on side - stakeholder capitalism is a lot more important now, dontcha know! - and in both of these important areas he’s already struggling. Shareholders recently sold off Meta stock at a record level, and there is already public employee dissent about the suitability of Meta as the company to lead us into a new age of the web, as well as evidence of staff leaving as the company pivots to this new focus/fixation/obsession/Kurtzian folly (okay, okay, worketc will stop now).
In fact, to prioritise a pipedream, however well road mapped or resourced, ahead of the needs of present staff - especially at a time when a) the employee-employer dynamic is shifting so obviously towards the employee, especially in-demand employees such as the one’s that Meta employs and b) when work’s ability to deliver happiness and purpose, as it is under this current conception of capitalism, is being questioned in a more mainstream manner - seems fairly blinkered and perhaps shows how obsessive the social media wunderkid has become in his virtual reality pursuit.
Perhaps he has forgotten it has no chance of coming to be if, in efforts to get there, he forgets to take his employees along too. (Which was the point Drennan, worketc believes, was making: that any chance of success, as a business, involves considering your people, your teams, and the larger organisation, and even customers and associated communities). (A counterpoint to this, and not one that worketc has ever looked into but that could form the basis of another article: does this agreement actually matter; especially if a company has near monopolistic presence in its industry, or is an effective monopoly employer due to its ability to either pay at a specific rate or employ certain skillsets. Amazon comes to mind here: well-known to have employment practises that cause literal injury and burnout but it still keeps posting record profits, despite widespread contemporary business thinking around how brand and employment practises supposedly underpin business viability. At the very least its worth thinking about.)
HR 101 and lip service
The thing that seems to be missing for Meta, at least in the latest motto debacle, is fairly basic HR and leadership understanding: showing staff you care about them, their past efforts, their views, and then including them in the decision-making processes. Perhaps this stuff is already happening at the firm - Zuckerberg still has a personal staff approval rating way above the usual CEO average - and perhaps this is merely cynicism from worketc, but even if an employer doesn’t believe in the moral importance or business effectiveness of these currently popular tenets of organisational management, or personally value them, putting in mechanisms that show that your staff will be listened to and your organisational culture is valued is important (and it’s important because staff are saying it’s important and are, more than ever, willing to kickback or leave if you don’t at least make some murmurings that you’ll meet their wants, at least partially, in this area).
This doesn’t mean companies should go about fostering a false togetherness and ‘positive’ working culture through punitive measures - as the New York Times reported, on Meta’s metaverse pivot, “workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or leave, one employee said, and some who disagreed with the new mission have departed” - or top-down approaches, such as rebranding the word employee with a cutesy, we’re-all-the-same nominative. Instead, this usually happens via a plethora of joined-up very real mechanisms that are guided by tangible, and algined, goals in the areas of inclusion, communication, openness, and care.
If not, the metaverse, whatever that comes to be, might never really take off, and not just because of the other issues - governance, harassment, viability, abuse - that are circling it’s yet-to-be-born form like vultures to carrion. Yes, Meta are hiring, yes they’re even nicking talent from competitors but things at the company might not get better and we may never end up in Prophet Zuck’s impactful, avatar-first future if he doesn’t make better efforts, at the very least in optics, of taking his employees along for the ride and letting them choose the direction, at least part of the time: by listening to their concerns - many have concerns about the issues on current platforms, around extremism and monetisation - and their ideas on what might work, and what doesn’t. If not - and maybe this isn’t a worry for Meta’s head honcho - he could end up fostering an employee base of mercenaries who are happy to come across for the paycheck and put up with demands to smile and be culturally compliant as long as the Oculus-underpinned gravy train is still shitting out pay checks.
If that’s the case, and it is still an if, Zuck’s Meta might go the same way as a litany of other companies who had very apparent employer-employee disconnects, meaning his metaverse may only ever be an alternate reality inside of his head (and not on the screens of our VR headsets).
*Life wasn’t sweet for all of those who worked for Facebook or associated partners in 2018. Perhaps this is obvious, there were serious issues re diversity and for those who worked for third-party content review companies, moderating extreme content for social media giants including Facebook, they were often subjected to harmful videos and images, earning a little as 70 pence an hour.
Furthermore, those who worked for contracted companies didn’t get access to the same perks and benefits as full-time employees. These include kitchen staff, cleaners, bike mechanics, security guards and janitors. With Facebook’s whopping wages for full-time staff driving staggering rent rises in the area around it’s head office, many of these workers worked up to three jobs to simply afford the cost of rent or formed part of an effective homeless contingent.
+ worketc initially thought that Silicon Valley would be more inured to the Great Resignation than other firms. Perhaps some staff there were still drinking the Kool Aid, perhaps the higher-than–average salaries were enough to keep staff tied down, perhaps they genuinely are excited by new products/world domination/the technology world, though it has lost some of its upstart sheen.
However, we were then reminded of a conversation with a very radical people leader in technology, that took place at the end of last year. They had said that it was because they worked in technology with high salaries that many in Silicon Valley could choose, and afford, to ‘drop out’ of work and follow whatever newly formulated passion or purpose they had. Indeed, reporting by MarketWatch found that those who had recently ‘dropped out’ of big tech employment, cited the chance to make a splash at a smaller company, and the opportunity to escape the stigma of working at some of tech’s biggest names.
Some cited burnout, others cited a wish to leave that had only been delayed by the pandemic whilst others dislike the centralised decision-making and top-down planning by executives as well as outside criticism of who they work. For example, there’s been a very public back-and-forth about the need to work on expensive campuses, with companies very keen to get employees back into offices, with many employees a lot more reticent.