San Francisco, Feb 18 (IANS): Meta (formerly Facebook) has reportedly given thousands of employees "subpar ratings" in a latest round of performance reviews, possibly setting the stage for more layoffs at the company.

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that the leadership at Meta "expects the ratings to lead more employees to leave in the coming weeks".

"The company will consider another round of layoffs if not enough depart," according to the report.

Meta managers gave approximately 10 per cent of employees a rating of "meets most", which is the second lowest performance rating at the company.

The lowest rating "meets some" is rare.

"Within Meta, some employees take such a rating as a sign to look for new work opportunities," said the report, citing sources.

The performance ratings reveal that more job cuts are likely to happen at the social network.

A company spokesperson was quoted as saying that "we have always had a goal-based culture of high performance, and our review process is intended to incentivise long-term thinking and high-quality work, while helping employees get actionable feedback".

Zuckerberg told investors last month that the company is "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".

Since last year, Meta executives have suggested that low performers wouldn't last at the company.

"Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg had said.

After firing 11,000 employees in November last year, Meta (formerly Facebook) is reportedly planning to reduce headcount further in its "year of efficiency", reported Financial Times earlier this week.

As a result, staff have complained that "zero work" is getting done as managers have been unable to plan their coming workloads, the report noted.

Meta did not comment on reports about upcoming layoffs.