Deepa Seetharaman, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2018 8:00 a.m. ET; see also
Facebook employees inside the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. Recent worker surveys showed fewer of them believing Facebook is making the world better. PHOTO: MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Facebook Inc.’s FB +0.29% difficult year is taking a toll on employee morale, with several key measures of internal sentiment taking a sharp turn for the worse over the past year, according to people familiar with the matter and messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Amid a plunge in the stock price, ongoing leadership turmoil and critical media coverage, just over half of employees said they were optimistic about Facebook’s future, down 32 percentage points from the year earlier, according to the survey, which was taken by nearly 29,000 employees. Fifty-three percent said Facebook was making the world better, down 19 percentage points from a year ago.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg directly addressed the survey results at a question-and-answer session in early November, some of the people said, saying he and other senior officials were taking steps to address the underlying issues.
The darkening mood within the social-media giant is notable in part because its workforce has been resilient through other difficult patches in the past. That includes the period after the 2016 presidential election, when many critics were blaming Facebook for allowing fabricated news articles to pervade the platform.
But many people inside Facebook say this period feels different, in part because of the unusual turbulence at the top of the company, which has struggled to respond to its various internal and external controversies. The declining stock price has also hurt morale among employees for whom stock options are a large part of their compensation, current and former employees say.
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“It has been a difficult period, but every day we see people pulling together to learn the lessons of the past year and build a stronger company,” a Facebook spokeswoman said. “Everyone at Facebook has a stake in our future and we are heads down shipping great products and protecting the people who use them.”
The biannual “pulse” survey asks employees to assess how strongly they believe in Facebook’s overall mission and whether they believe the company has a positive effect on the world, people familiar with the surveys say. It also asks them to measure their satisfaction with their individual managers and work-life balance.
These types of polls are increasingly common as companies try to gauge employee sentiment and identify any problems before they fester.
There are some 30 questions on the Facebook survey, which is conducted in April and October every year.
Employees on average said they intended to stay another 3.9 years at Facebook, down from 4.3 years a year earlier. About 12% said they planned to stay less than a year. Former employees said these figures typically rose.
In survey responses, some employees indicated they were worried about Facebook’s sharpened focus on growth and frustrated over a “lack of innovation” within the company. Employees also questioned the company’s higher emphasis on the main Facebook platform over Instagram, WhatsApp and other growing services that Facebook owns.
FACEBOOK’S ROUGH YEAR
- Russian Hackers Largely Skipped the Midterms, and No One Really Knows Why (Nov. 12)
- Instagram Co-Founders to Step Down From Facebook (Sept. 25)
- Facebook Shares Tumble as Growth Outlook Darkens (July 25)
- Facebook to Start Taking Down Posts That Could Lead to Violence (July 18)
- SEC Probes Why Facebook Didn’t Warn Sooner on Privacy Lapse (July 12)
- Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders (June 5)
- Release of Thousands of Russia-Linked Facebook Ads Shows How Propaganda Sharpened(May 10)
- Facebook Data on 87 Million Users May Have Been Improperly Shared (April 4)
In July, Facebook startled investors with dour growth projections that sent its stock price tumbling. Shares haven’t recovered and remain down more than 35% in the past four months, putting the company on track to have its first annual share-price decline since going public in 2012.
Facebook is one of the few major tech companies whose stocks have dropped significantly in the past year, while rivals like Twitter Inc. have jumped and Google parent AlphabetInc. has remained mostly flat.
Morale has also been hit by a near-constant barrage of criticism from outsiders about its lax data-privacy practices, growth-oriented culture and role in fanning violence in volatile countries such as Myanmar, current and former employees say.
Leadership turmoil is another factor. For most of its nearly 15-year history, Facebook’s leadership was remarkably stable, but nearly a dozen high-profile or senior executives have announced their departures this year, including Facebook’s top lawyer and longtime policy chief as well as co-founders of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Facebook’s employee base was 33,606 at the end of September 2018, up 45% from the year before. Many of the new employees work in the areas of safety and security and currently are sitting on stock options that are worth less now than a year ago.
Broader employee sentiment about the company has been slowly declining for nearly two years, according to surveys. The overall favorability score, or how Facebook measures broader sentiment toward the company, stood at 70% in October, down from 73% a year ago, the survey shows. It was 74% in early 2017.
Seventy percent of employees said they were proud to work at Facebook, down from 87% a year earlier, the survey shows.
In some areas, Facebook employees’ sentiment held steady. About 81% of employees said it was important to fulfill Facebook’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—roughly flat compared with a year ago.
Some current and former employees say sentiment has started to turn around after the midterm elections last week, during which the company appeared to have avoided major catastrophes. Mr. Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg addressed employees two days after the midterms to reflect on the lessons of 2018, a person familiar with the matter said.
Some employees indicated that they were cautiously optimistic that the company was heading in the right direction after more than two bruising years.
That turnaround is not yet reflected in the survey data. A year ago, 84% of Facebook employees said they were optimistic about the company’s future. At the time, Facebook had just disclosed that Russian-backed actors had purchased ads and spread disinformation on Facebook using fake identities.
That fell to about 67% in April, shortly after the company disclosed that an academic broke Facebook’s rules and shared user records with the political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
It now stands at 52%.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
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