A 2nd round of layoffs at Meta and Amazon shows companies are taking back their power — and they may not stop there

• Meta and Amazon have announced two series of mass layoffs in the span of months.
• The moves suggest workplace norms are crumbling amid social and economic change, experts said.

Decisions by Meta and Amazon to conduct a second series of mass layoffs just months after their first suggest that some of the power workers had won in recent years is shifting back to companies.

Management experts told Insider the tug-of-war over issues like pay, working from home, and even buzzy ideas like "quiet quitting" has ushered in a paradigm in which fewer maneuvers appear out of bounds for companies.

That extends to how — and how often — companies shed workers when they're no longer needed, Angie Kamath, the dean of the New York University School of Professional Studies, told Insider.

After years of companies trying to attract and placate workers amid a labor shortage, businesses are reasserting some of their power. Call it the "Great Reclamation."

Conventional thinking about multiple rounds of layoffs being a terrible management practice, while still valid, may no longer matter because of shifting economic and social mores, she said.

"There are labor-market behaviors that are new both for workers and for employers — and these behaviors are not following traditional patterns of the past," she said. "We read about two rounds of layoffs now and shrug and say, 'When's the third?'"

All bets are off

Amazon on Monday announced it was laying off 9,000 employees, or about 3% of its corporate workforce, on top of slashing 18,000 positions in January. Meta, meanwhile, said last week that it was axing about 10,000 staffers, in addition to the 11,000 it cut in November.

It's rare for a company to conduct multiple rounds of layoffs, according to data from Crunchbase. Last year, about 9% of the 433 tech companies it tracked laid off workers more than once.

But it could become more commonplace, Kamath said, adding: "There are a different set of circumstances that are driving responses to what's going on today, so that old alchemy of what's not too much, what's not too little, and what's just right doesn't matter."

In other words: All bets are off. The "Great Resignation," a phenomenon in which record numbers of workers have voluntarily left their jobs, is another example of how this is playing out, Kamath said.

In the past, people stayed in jobs for longer and were perhaps more willing to remain at organizations where they were unhappy out of a sense of loyalty or obligation. But the pandemic inspired many people to recalibrate what they wanted out of their lives and work. Quitting for more money, a better schedule, or a fancier title became de rigueur.

Now it's employers that are turning accepted norms on their head, as Amazon's and Meta's latest cuts show.

The moves could provide cover to other employers mulling additional sets of layoffs, Dina Denham Smith, an executive coach and the owner of Cognitas, said. She added that when Twitter's owner and CEO, Elon Musk, told employees last year that they would be required to work from the office — or forced to resign — a number of other CEOs followed suit with office mandates.

"Social contagion is real," she said. "It doesn't give other companies permission to do more layoffs, but it does give them cover. Amazon and Meta did it, so it won't stand out as much."

Leaner times mean harsher measures

To be clear: Conducting more than one round of layoffs in short order is generally ill-advised, experts say.

If layoffs must happen, it's considered best practice to do them in one fell swoop, not dribs and drabs, which can dent employee morale and innovation, Andrew Moyer, a general manager at Reputation Partners, a strategic-communications firm, told Insider.

"The ideal process is that you rip off the Band-Aid once," he said.

While Meta and Amazon might be given some leeway for their second series of job cuts considering continuing economic uncertainty and the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the fact that the companies didn't hint that there would be more than one round makes the news harder to digest, Moyer said.

"These companies telegraphed that they were reacting to market conditions, which led employees to believe there was going to be one cut," he said.

He added: "But now with this ongoing uncertainty, customers might wonder, 'Are things worse than we think they are?' Partners and shareholders might ask: 'Is this the right management team?' Employees are thinking, 'When's the next shoe going to drop?'"

So while multiple rounds of layoffs could become more standard in this new era of work, it's not necessarily a positive development for either side, NYU's Kamath said. "Companies need to make sure this doesn't become a race to the bottom," she said.

"Just because workers have gotten used to so much change and have a higher tolerance for it," she added, "shouldn't be an invitation for companies to throw a lot of change at them because it can erode trust and stability."