Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) develops human resources with its organizational culture in mind. The company maintains its competitiveness partly through its organizational culture. A firm’s organizational or corporate culture defines the traditions, values, and customs that influence employee behavior. In this business analysis case of Facebook, the corporate culture translates to the way employees solve problems, as the organization’s social networking websites, apps, and marketplace services evolve. Meta uses its organizational culture to promote creativity and innovation, which address competition with social media and online advertising firms, like Google (Alphabet), X (Twitter), Snap Inc., and Microsoft’s LinkedIn. Innovation and creativity also protect Facebook Marketplace from competitors, like Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, eBay. As a global online technology business, Facebook uses its corporate culture to build competitive advantages and highly capable human resources. Meta adapts its cultural traits to continue its effectiveness in addressing cultural challenges linked to online market dynamics.
Core Values. Meta’s core values establish the fundamental principles that define employees’ behaviors and their work culture. The core values that affect Facebook and other operations of Meta Platforms are: (1) Move fast; (2) Focus on long-term impact; (3) Build awesome things; (4) Live in the future; (5) Be direct and respect your colleagues; and (6) Be good stewards of the company and mission. With these core values, the company culture encourages workers to achieve better performance for the social media company’s long-term success. The cultural traits based on these core values are analyzed as follows. Collectively, these traits present an organizational culture that makes Facebook and its strategic management effective in the global market.
Facebook’s Organizational Culture & Its Traits
Facebook has an organizational culture of speed and authenticity. These cultural traits encourage employees to strive for improvement. Such improvement focuses on Facebook’s (Meta’s) mission statement and vision statement and related goals. The company applies its organizational culture as a tool for supporting business resilience and competitiveness. For example, through continuous improvement and iteration, the company supports social media and online advertising service enhancement. Also, Facebook’s (Meta’s) organizational structure or company structure affects the benefits of the company culture in workforce development. Human resources are developed and maintained through training that ensures talent and skills for the company’s aims in creativity and innovation for its social media business. The core values establish the following characteristics of Facebook’s organizational culture:
- Creative problem-solving and decision-making
- Boldness
- Openness
- Speed
- Continuous improvement
Creative Problem-Solving and Decision-Making. Facebook values creative problem-solving and decision-making, which are embodied in the company’s organizational culture. This corporate cultural characteristic pertains to the ability of employees to generate unusual ideas that enhance Meta’s social networking and related offerings. Rewards are provided through recognition, incentives, and other forms that motivate workers to be more creative in contributing to the business. Such rewards help address Facebook’s (Meta’s) corporate social responsibilities to its stakeholders, particularly its employees. Through this organizational cultural characteristic, the company maintains competitive advantages over other firms in the international market, especially other social media companies that offer online advertising services. This trait of the company culture achieves business competitiveness by accounting for the social trends enumerated in the PESTEL/PESTLE analysis of Facebook (Meta).
Boldness. Facebook’s organizational culture facilitates boldness in employees’ activities. This cultural feature aims to maximize the company’s flexibility in addressing business issues. For example, the corporate culture encourages workers to tackle issues right away, if possible, instead of waiting for such issues to escalate to senior management. Meta Platforms, Inc. benefits from this cultural characteristic in terms of minimizing the negative effects of problems encountered in its business.
Openness. Openness significantly influences Facebook’s corporate culture. This cultural feature highlights the importance of effective and efficient internal communications. For example, the company has systems to facilitate the dissemination of information critical to solving problems. In addition, Facebook’s organizational culture facilitates openness in terms of minimizing restrictions on employees’ activities. For instance, Meta empowers workers to focus on the problems that they think are most important or relevant to the business. This characteristic of the corporate culture supports employees’ problem-solving abilities to enhance the company’s social networking and online advertising services.
Speed. Facebook has the ability to easily respond to trends and changes in users’ preferences. This ability is partly based on employees’ speed in responding to problems in the social media business. Such speed is a significant feature of Facebook’s organizational culture. The company believes that it is essential that its human resources rapidly react to new needs in the multinational market for digital services. This corporate cultural characteristic is implemented through small teams. Small teams are highly flexible and can move fast to support Meta’s rapid product development processes.
Continuous Improvement. Facebook has an organizational culture that facilitates continuous improvement. The company adheres to the principle that improvement is a never-ending process. This cultural feature encourages its small teams to continuously iterate products. This cultural trait provides opportunities for the company to regularly evaluate its social networking websites, mobile apps, and related products, to support the business strengths shown in the SWOT analysis of Facebook (Meta).
Advantages & Disadvantages of Meta’s (Facebook’s) Work Culture
Facebook’s status as one of the world’s biggest social media businesses is partly founded on the company’s organizational culture. An advantage of this corporate culture is its support for flexibility, especially in rapidly addressing issues and problems in the social media business. Another advantage is that the culture facilitates Facebook’s continuous improvement, which is essential in the context of online services. For example, continuous improvement helps develop solutions to online security issues arising from technological advances and changes to the Internet. Thus, these cultural traits strengthen competitive advantages and contribute to the effectiveness of Facebook’s (Meta’s) generic competitive strategy and intensive growth strategies.
A disadvantage of Facebook’s organizational culture is the difficulty in strictly implementing new mandates that impose limits on employees’ activities. This is so because the company’s workers are accustomed to a corporate culture where they are empowered to flexibly do their jobs. Such empowerment supports continuous improvement. Facebook can address this disadvantage through management initiatives that improve strategic implementation and internal communication effectiveness.
References
- Karneli, O. (2023). Analysis of motivation, work culture, and work environment on the level of employee integrity in the company. International Journal of Environmental, Sustainability, and Social Science, 4(2), 547-551.
- Meta Platforms, Inc. – Diversity and Inclusion Programs.
- Meta Platforms, Inc. – Facebook Life.
- Meta Platforms, Inc. – Innovation.
- Ng, K. Y. N. (2023). Effects of organizational culture, affective commitment and trust on knowledge-sharing tendency. Journal of Knowledge Management, 27(4), 1140-1164.