‘Meta, Metamates, me’: Mark Zuckerberg sets out order of importance and values for staff at Facebook and Instagram owner
Mark Zuckerberg has set out a number of corporate values that employees at Facebook-owner Meta should adhere by.
During a virtual company meeting yesterday, the Facebook founder introduced the catchphrase ‘Meta, Metamates, me’, according to reports in the Washington Post and on the Gizmodo website.
The catchphrase reportedly sets out the order of importance by which Meta staff should rank the interests of the company vs their colleagues and teams vs their personal interests.
All employees of Meta, the relatively new parent company of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, will in the future refer to themselves and each other as ‘Metamates’.
The term was created by the famous cognitive scientist and author Douglas Hofstadter, according to ‘Boz’, or Andrew Bosworth, who was recently promoted to Meta’ chief technical officer.
The tech site Verge further reported that, while Zuckerberg is addressed its employees during the virtual meeting, he said that “move fast” will become “move fast together”, “be bold” will be replaced with “build awesome things” and “focus on long term impact” would be introduced as a new corporate value.
Zuckerberg reportedly said that Meta employees should not “nice ourselves to death” and that the company’s conviction of “be open” has been replaced by “live in the future” while “be direct and respect your colleagues” has been swapped for “be open”.
Rebranding
The extensive efforts to rebrand Facebook come after years of negative publicity and regulatory scrutiny.
Zuckerberg took to his Facebook page yesterday to explain the new corporate values, stressing Metamate is a about “collective responsibility.”
“Meta, Metamates, Me is about being good stewards of our company and mission. It’s about the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates. It’s about taking care of our company and each other.”
Mark Zuckerberg on FB last night
“At the end of the day, values aren’t what you write on a website but what we hold each other accountable for every day,” he added.
“Now is the right time to update our values and our cultural operating system. I’ve always believed that in order for values to be useful, they need to be ideas that good companies can reasonably disagree with or emphasize differently,” he added.
“By working at Meta, we commit to applying these values to our work every day. I think these values capture how we must act as a company to bring our vision to life,” Zuckerberg stressed.