Meta wanted to send a message to its workforce with today's cuts. It may have sent the wrong one
When Meta began notifying thousands of employees of their layoffs this morning, the immediate spotlight fell on those walking out the door. The restructuring, which will cut approximately 8,000 roles or 10% of the company’s global workforce, is one of the most significant tech sector shake-ups of the year; yet the story that will define Meta's future, say those who study how organizations survive transformation, may belong to those who remain.
Eva Johnson, Sr. Director Analyst and HR Advisor at Gartner, speaks to the human reality of how these notifications land.
“When it finally does happen, it is really very demoralizing and demotivating to the employees to just receive an email to say, this is what’s happening with your job,” she said. “And then it leaves the teams who are remaining with a bit of PTSD and not sure what’s going to happen next.”
Leonard Boussioux, assistant professor of information systems at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, whose research centers on how humans and AI can work together effectively, shares that concern.
“The danger with layoffs is to instill a psychological uncertainty in the employees,” he said. “A workforce that doesn’t feel safe can potentially not enable the change that is desired. So, a layoff is not necessarily the right tool to enable that culture change.”
Meta is reportedly moving around 7,000 employees into AI-focused roles and consolidating them into four new organizations, with engineering and product teams bearing the brunt of the cuts. It is, Boussioux argues, a bold strategic bet; one made without the research to back it up.
A leap of faith, not a proven formula
The restructuring, as Boussioux sees it, is as much a message to investors and stakeholders as it is an operational overhaul.
“It looks like Meta has made a very quick decision, and I think it reflects the desire to show that we take AI seriously and we want to take a bold stance around it,” he said. “The danger is that we don’t yet fully understand how AI is transforming work.”
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He is particularly focused on a distinction he believes companies keep getting wrong. Replacing a task, he explains, is not the same as replacing a job; AI may automate certain functions, but that doesn’t mean the person performing those functions becomes redundant.
“The work is clearly changing because of AI,” Boussioux said. “But it does not mean that we have to remove employees. It rather means that we have to reorganize the way we work.”
What makes Meta’s move particularly risky, in his view, is that no one yet has a reliable roadmap. Economists who have dedicated entire careers to studying automation and augmentation, Boussioux notes, still disagree on AI’s ultimate impact on the labor market.
“Every company that makes a choice such as a layoff does not have a specific idea yet if it’s going to be successful or not,” he said. “This is really an ongoing process.”
The survivor penalty
The employees who kept their jobs this morning aren’t simply lucky; they are, in a real sense, casualties of a different kind. Johnson points out that the distraction set in long before today’s emails arrived.
“It is a significant distraction, and not just from today forward,” she said. “Employees have an inkling of these things sometimes weeks or months in advance.”
Once the cuts land, the spiral deepens.
“They’re not focused on their productivity. They’re really kind of focused on what’s going to happen to me, and is this going to happen to me, and when. Do I need to start thinking about looking elsewhere?” she said.
Boussioux describes the same dynamic through a well-documented psychological lens.
“There is this survivors’ feeling sometimes that brings some guilt to the employees that were not laid off, thinking that my friends have been laid off and I haven’t,” he said. “So, there is that feeling that sometimes lingers and does not enable the safety to actually enable the change that is desired.”
The problem compounds when the threat of further cuts hangs in the air, as it does at Meta, which has signaled that this round may not be the last.
“If you have a Damocles sword on top of your head that you might be laid off fairly soon, this does not create the right space for you to dedicate your energy and time and motivation to make the company grow,” Boussioux said.
The irony, he points out, is that fear can push employees in one of two directions: toward the change the company wants, or toward the exit.
Johnson also flags the reputational cost of how Meta executed the cuts, noting that an email notification at scale leaves a mark that lingers.
“The way that you treat your employees on their way out has a significant impact on the engagement level of those who are staying,” she said.
And when it comes to future hiring, she sees a reckoning ahead, even if the current job market has temporarily shielded companies from the consequences.
“The pendulum always swings back,” Johnson said. “Right now, it’s in the employer’s favor. But once that pendulum does swing back and it is more of an employee market, that’s when you’re really going to see the impact of those things.”
A talent exodus, gradually and steadily, is one plausible outcome.
“The management has a tremendous responsibility here, the responsibility to rebuild trust,” Boussioux said. “The responsibility to show that for the employees that remain, they invest in the long term with them.”
Whether that message has been communicated clearly inside Meta is, he suggests, an open question.
HR caught in the middle
For HR teams inside Meta and elsewhere, today’s events represent a particular kind of professional pressure. Johnson notes that, in most organizations, HR is not at the table when executives decide to cut; it is handed the outcome and asked to implement it with as much humanity as possible.
“You have an immense amount of empathy for the employees, many of whom you likely know personally and have worked with for a really long time,” she said. “But you also have an obligation to the organization.”
At Meta’s scale, that tension is especially acute. Coordinating layoff notifications across global time zones, thousands of employees, and multiple business units make any personal touch difficult to execute. Still, Johnson argues that the effort matters.
“HR people really do try to do this with as much empathy and understanding as they possibly can, because they also know that how the people who are treated as they’re leaving is a reflection on the organization, a reflection on the brand, a reflection on the HR team.”
The road back: trust, vision and psychological safety
Boussioux is not writing Meta off. He says the company has exceptional engineers, deep resources, and the kind of talent that doesn’t disappear overnight; but rebuilding momentum will require management to prioritize the human side of this transition alongside the technological one.
“It will come back to respecting the current employees by giving them back trust, by enabling them to feel long-term safety, and creating that psychological space for them to innovate again, because it’s teamwork,” he said. “The management will have to think deeply about how to recreate the flow that is necessary for innovation.”
Johnson echoes that point, adding that the success of Meta’s AI ambitions will ultimately hinge on the humans it is counting on to execute them.
“It is important to play the long game on this and realize that it is humans that are going to be driving all of the changes and the ROI and the productivity that you’re looking for,” she said. “Even though we’re talking about this in the context of AI and technology, it really is going to be the humans that are going to decide and drive the success of these projects.”
Other companies have taken a markedly different approach. Walmart and Costco, Boussioux offered, have embraced AI without resorting to mass layoffs; instead, they have been encouraging employees to take on new projects and workflows, framing the technology not as a threat to headcount but as a tool that creates room for more ambitious work.
“The idea is that we believe in our people, we trust our workforce, and this is time to create more things, for more value, with the same employees,” Boussioux said.
He points to an emerging organizational model he finds compelling: small, agile “AI pods,” or cross-functional teams with access to AI tools that allow them to prototype, test, and ship quickly. Employees in these structures need multiple skills, moving fluidly between managing, building, and talking to customers. It is a genuine reimagining of the job, not an elimination of it.
“Sometimes companies prefer to lay off instead of helping their employees to upskill and take that new position of leadership,” he said.
What comes next
What AI actually demands, Boussioux says, is not a smaller workforce but a different one.
“You don’t necessarily need fewer people because of AI,” he said. “You can actually leverage more opportunities because your employees can do different things that were impossible before. I’m hoping that Meta will see that other companies are already seeing this.”
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For Johnson, it comes back to outcomes.
"Devaluing the humans within your organization is not going to help you get the ROI or get whatever it is that you're trying to do out of these organizational transformations," she said.
The technology is still evolving; where exactly it needs humans in the process, she notes, may look different than it does today.
The companies best positioned to win the AI transition, Boussioux argues, are those treating it as a human transformation rather than simply a technological one; and trust, more than any particular tool or org chart, is the foundation that makes that transformation possible.
“When you give trust, when you properly educate, this is a good thing. I really believe that with the proper management, with the proper upskilling, AI is a strength for employees,” he said.
Whether Meta’s leadership heeds that advice will determine not just the success of this restructure, but the loyalty, productivity, and creative capacity of the workforce left behind.
