t

os
W33549

META: DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT AT

rP
SCALE AND WITH AGILITY

Munir Mandviwalla, Laurel Miller, and Larry Dignan wrote this case solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not
intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names
and other identifying information to protect confidentiality.

This publication may not be transmitted, photocopied, digitized, or otherwise reproduced in any form or by any means without the

yo
permission of the copyright holder. Reproduction of this material is not covered under authorization by any reproduction rights
organization. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, contact Ivey Publishing, Ivey Business School, Western
University, London, Ontario, Canada, N6G 0N1; (t) 519.661.3208; (e) [email protected]; www.iveypublishing.ca. Our goal is to publish
materials of the highest quality; submit any errata to [email protected]. i1v2e5y5pubs

Copyright © 2023, Ivey Business School Foundation Version: 2023-08-08

In March 2020, the pandemic put a full stop to in-person onboarding at Meta Platforms Inc. (Meta), formerly
op
Facebook. During a leadership meeting, Atish Banerjea, who was hired as chief information officer in 2016
from NBCUniversal Media LLC (NBCUniversal), was tasked with restarting the process of onboarding
new employees into the firm and simultaneously supporting the pivot to remote work. It was clear to
Banerjea that the future growth and prosperity of Meta was dependent on talent and digitally enabling
current workers. Before the pandemic, it had not been unusual for the firm to bring in more than 1,000 new
employees each week. Following the leadership meeting, Banerjea assembled a team to rewire Meta’s
tC

onboarding and employee experience processes. Until that point, all of Meta’s focus—and Banerjea’s
mandate—had been on enhancing in-person work. Banerjea and his team had to quickly lead Meta’s pivot
to remote onboarding and remote work around the world at scale.

Banerjea wondered how his unit, Enterprise Engineering, would respond to the new challenges. Could the
team really change the firm’s behaviour in a very short time? Could it acquire and/or build the tools needed
to change behaviour? More importantly, how would all this work fit within the unit’s agile culture?
No

META’S EVOLUTION AND FACILITIES: ECHOING A PURPOSEFUL HACKER CULTURE

Meta Platforms, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, had grown at a breakneck pace; with 2021
revenue of US$117.93 billion, up from $3.71 billion in 2011, it had quickly become one of the world’s
most valuable companies.1 Meta’s family of apps, which included Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp,
averaged 2.88 billion daily active users in June 2022.2
Do

Meta had grown like few other companies due to the boom in social media as well as its “hacker culture,”
which led to a May 18, 2012, initial public offering (IPO). In its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Facebook outlined its culture:
1
Macrotrends LLC, “Meta Platforms Revenue 2010–2023 | META,” Macrotrends, accessed May 11, 2023,
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/revenue.
2
Meta Platforms Inc., “Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results,” News Release, July 27, 2022, 1,
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Meta-06.30.2022-Exhibit-99.1-Final.pdf.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 2 W33549

t
We value our “hacker culture,” which we define as a work environment that rewards creative problem

os
solving and rapid decision making. We try to move fast in developing new products and then
continually iterate and optimize to further improve our products. We seek employees who are
motivated by the ability to have a direct impact on how hundreds of millions of people around the
world connect, discover, and express themselves.3

rP
To accommodate its growth, Meta built new headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in 2015 and added a major
expansion at the end of 2018. Both were designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. According to Gehry,
“We were getting lessons in Facebook culture and we are making a new kind of architecture within that culture.”4

The LEED-platinum-certified company headquarters (HQ), termed MPK by employees, included a rooftop
garden of more than 1.2 hectares (three acres); solar power that could generate 2 million kilowatts; outdoor
firelit workspaces spread out throughout the campus; and natural light covering about 250 acres and 30

yo
buildings. The HQ was designed to spread employees out among others who specialized in different areas
to encourage cross-functional collaboration. The main street of the campus had been called Disneyland by
some because, with amenities such as a barbershop, it looked a bit like the Downtown Disney District.
Further, employees were encouraged to “hack” their workspaces, even public areas.5 Even though one-third
of Meta employees worked in Menlo Park, this kind of attention to the workspace also showed up in Meta
campuses in New York, Seattle, Dublin, Hyderabad, Tokyo, and other cities.6

Meta had had to dramatically increase its workforce, going from 3,200 full-time employees at the end of 2011
op
to 71,970 a decade later—a growth of more than 2,000 per cent. As part of this growth, the culture of the firm
emphasized employees being together in engaging physical spaces. According to Banerjea, “We had more of an
in-person culture than other companies, where people already worked from home two to three times a week.”7

In March 2020, when the pandemic shut down all in-person work, Banerjea, a graduate of Temple
University in Philadelphia, envisioned significant obstacles: Orientation for new engineers was a six-week
tC

in-person bootcamp. The new-employee onboarding process, which applied also to interns, primarily relied
on face-to-face interaction. Managers typically interviewed prospective hires in person, got together in a
conference room to collect feedback, and made decisions. The problem was not limited to recruitment; the
entire workforce management cycle was going to be a challenge. For example, annual review sessions were
conducted in an office. At a more basic level, day-to-day work had until then occurred primarily in-person.
After all, Meta had invested considerable resources in providing an attractive workspace and amenities such
as unique dining options, event and meeting spaces with state-of-the-art collaboration technology, and
No

flexible workstations. Finally, the sheer scale of the challenge was daunting, given the large and growing
number of employees supporting an even larger and growing number of customers.

Banerjea wondered if he could leverage his prior experiences in senior roles at NBCUniversal, Dex One
Corporation, Pearson, and Simon and Schuster to manage the challenge. He knew that digitizing onboarding
as well as many other in-person activities at Meta in the short run would require scaling the technology and
meeting the expectations of professional engineers, who were his primary customers, and that he would
3
Facebook, Inc., Form S-1 Registration Statement, February 1, 2012, 94,
Do

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm.
4
Katharine Keane, “Facebook Reveals Frank Gehry-Designed HQ Expansion,” Architect, September 5, 2018,
https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/facebook-reveals-frank-gehrydesigned-hq-expansion_o.
5
Mae Rice, “Wild Foxes Roam Facebook’s Menlo Park Headquarters,” Built In SF, March 9, 2020,
https://www.builtinsf.com/2020/02/25/facebook-headquarters-menlo-park-office.
6
Rosie Downey, “Largest Silicon Valley Employers,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, August 2, 2019,
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/subscriber-only/2019/07/19/largest-silicon-valley-employers.html; Meta Platforms Inc.,
“Offices,” Meta, accessed July 31, 2022, https://about.facebook.com/media-gallery/offices-around-the-world/.
7
Atish Banerjea (CIO, Meta Platforms), in discussion with case authors, April 7, 2022.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 3 W33549

t
have to adapt enterprise tools for some of the best talent in the world to change how they worked. More

os
importantly, he would have to do this quickly. The future of the firm depended on it.

STARTING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

rP
Prior to the pandemic, Banerjea’s organization, Enterprise Engineering, had focused on highly scalable
employee productivity solutions to keep pace with and facilitate Meta’s rapid growth. The division had
provided products, tools, and services to employees. Banerjea was satisfied that he had achieved his original
goal of evolving Enterprise Engineering’s culture from that of a help desk to that of a strategic partner for
business units across the firm. The ethos of Enterprise Engineering had shifted to resemble that of a
consumer product engineering team.8 He wondered if he could transfer this new ethos to a digital
transformation of workforce management.

yo
Banerjea’s pandemic taskforce included the following individuals: Jean de Boysson, director of Enterprise
Infrastructure and Security, brought extensive experience in infrastructure management, service delivery,
and security from his time spent on Wall Street and in founding and running a start-up. De Boysson’s role
was focused on virtual infrastructure scaling, fleet provisioning, and access management in a remote-first
world. Carissa Melasippo, chief of staff and director of Business Operations, had been with Meta for close
to ten years. She engaged with teams across the company to enable cross-collaboration. Melasippo brought
an extensive background in finance from prior roles at other Fortune 500 companies and at Meta. She was
op
also an expert at identifying and analyzing relevant data, understanding key stakeholders, and putting
business practices in place to enable the company to operate as efficiently in possible. Steven Ruggiero,
vice-president of Enterprise Operations, enabled the enterprise supply chain, event production, executive
support, and employee tech support channels. Anil Wilson, vice-president of Enterprise Engineering,
acquired extensive product management experience at Intuit Inc. and Oracle Corporation prior to joining
Meta, where he led the product and engineering teams’ building of enterprise products.
tC

The Sunday night when COVID-19 shut down operations in 2020 was still fresh in the minds of Banerjea’s
team members as they started thinking about how to tackle the daunting challenges ahead. Before the
pandemic, Meta had on-boarded thousands of employees each week. Each of these employees came to
headquarters at Menlo Park, California; received a laptop; and learned about corporate applications, their
benefits, and everything a new worker needed. “Everyone we service needed to move fast to get their jobs
done,” explained Banerjea. “An employee had to be functional on day one.”9
No

DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING ONBOARDING AND REMOTE WORK

The team had two key pressing challenges: first, it had to restart the flow of new employees and get them
situated; and second, equally importantly, it had to enable remote work for more than 70,000 employees
worldwide. However, the team faced chaos; the pandemic generated fear and breakdowns; there was no
handbook; and, given Meta’s scale, external playbooks and solutions were never going to be sufficient.
Do

Banerjea and his team quickly realized that if they focused only on putting out fires and operated on an
issue-by-issue, day-to-day basis, they would quickly become overwhelmed. On the other hand, it was also
clear that they would fall far behind if they adopted a traditional, structured top-down management planning

8
Atish Banerjea, “How Our Build Culture Helps Meta Grow Rapidly and Stay Innovative,” Meta, November 8, 2021,
https://tech.fb.com/ideas/2021/11/build-culture/.
9
Banerjea, April 7, 2022.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 4 W33549

t
approach. Borrowing from his software engineering background, and hoping to leverage the hacker culture

os
that already existed at Meta, Banerjea decided to apply agile development principles to manage the process.
The team focused on what was known as the minimum viable product (MVP) concept.10 MVP was best
known as a process to bring new ideas to market, and it often used agile development principles.11 In MVP,
the focus was about developing enough core capabilities to be functional and no more. The “no more”
principle was going to be the key here; given the multitude of challenges ahead, the team would have to

rP
“ruthlessly prioritize.” Yet Banerjea wondered if going full tilt with agile and MVP was the right
management approach. Only time would tell.

The team identified several bottlenecks that would have to be addressed before they could restart new-
employee onboarding. Items such as welcoming new employees and training could be managed at individual
divisional or departmental levels through video conferencing. However, given the evolving human resources
(HR) policies, it was unclear what employee details they could gather and, more critically, how they were

yo
going to get laptops to personnel worldwide to meet the standard of enabling each new employee to be
functional on day one. And of course, there were also tens of thousands of existing employees spread out
around the world who needed equipment and devices. Getting computing equipment to each employee, both
new and current, turned out be a major challenge that kept escalating as the team discovered new obstacles:
First, the team’s backlogs were increasing by thousands each week. Second, prior to the pandemic, laptops
had been shipped by manufacturers to Meta’s centralized locations, from which they were distributed in
person. Meta now had to pivot and become a consumer-oriented solutions provider that customized and set
up computers for individual employees in one location and then shipped them individually to the employee
op
home addresses on file. Previously, employees had received laptops that were already set up, which were then
configured and provided in person. Now, the company had to build systems to track inventory, manage dates
when devices could be shipped to employees, manage complex data and privacy requirements, and keep track
of the status of all the moving parts. Third, the team’s existing shipping solutions were insufficient as they
were too difficult to integrate with existing Meta systems and unable to handle the efficiencies needed to
process at high volume and high speed. The team had to write its own code to integrate with FedEx’s systems.
tC

Fourth, countries and regions had unique shipping challenges and regulatory requirements, especially for
computers. For example, the shipping and regulatory issues in India were particularly challenging. The team
now had to customize its solutions on a country-by-country basis.

According to Banerjea, “We shifted from a drop-ship supply chain to a consumer-ship supply chain in every
country where we have employees.”12 Despite these obstacles, the team pulled together all the relevant moving
parts and resources across the firm to make significant progress in a few weeks and restart onboarding. Meta
No

frequently surveyed new hires on the effectiveness of its onboarding process, and importantly, the pre-
pandemic and post-pandemic new-hire ratings were similar. Banerjea wondered if the agile MVP focus had
played a role in getting the team this far and whether they could continue to lean on this principle.

Success led to more requests. Meta did not want to abandon its interns, so as soon as the team had succeeded
in providing employees with the necessary equipment, it was asked to add interns to the mix. The interns
also needed computing equipment to perform tasks and participate fully in the Meta experience. The team
also successfully piloted a unique “zero equipment” remote desktop solution that allowed some team
members to use their own equipment to engage with Meta and accomplish their work.
Do

10
Valentina Lenarduzzi and Davide Taibi, (2016, August). “MVP Explained: A Systematic Mapping Study on the Definitions of
Minimal Viable Product,” in Proceedings, 42nd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications:
SEAA 2016 (Limassol, Cyprus: IEEE, 2016): 112–119). IEEE.
11
“Principles behind the Agile Manifesto,” accessed July 31, 2022, https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
12
Banerjea, April 7, 2022.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 5 W33549

t
SCALING REMOTE WORK

os
All of this activity was just one part of the rapid digital transformation. At the same time, Meta had to
dramatically expand its infrastructure, including expanding its virtual private network (VPN) capacity to
handle remote work and substantially increasing bandwidth. The company quickly became a customer of
Zoom Video Communications Inc.. According to Banerjea, back in 2019, Meta had facilitated over half a

rP
million video calls per month. Now, during the first three months of remote work from March to May 2020,
there was a fivefold increase in video conferencing traffic. The company also had to quickly scale up its
video collaboration services and capabilities to meet the increase in demand without degrading quality or
reliability. In general, much of the infrastructure work involved adding telemetry to identify bottlenecks,
which were typically addressed by inserting middleware-style orchestration and tools on top of third-party
products to increase scale tenfold. In addition, Meta tripled its endpoint delivery; provided residential
support for executives; and built new processes to get information, manage devices, and fix problems.

yo
DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

Onboarding, remote work, computing access, and scaling up of the infrastructure were just the start of the
digital transformation. It soon became clear to Banerjea that bringing employees online would also necessitate
providing a set of relevant digital tools to enable their success—that simply duplicating prior processes by
providing more interaction and automating what was already there would not always work. Again, this would
op
have to be accomplished at high speed and at scale. Prior to the pandemic, most day-to-day work and
management at Meta (e.g., meetings, employee reviews) was done in person. Day-to-day meetings had shifted
to video conferencing, as they had at other firms. But that was only part of the puzzle. The challenge was to
digitize and improve other aspects of the workforce management and development cycle. Further, Banerjea
understood that his technically sophisticated users were not going to accept “good enough” digital
infrastructure but would expect tools that met their cultural expectations for the “gold standard.”
tC

The team started working on digitally transforming workforce management processes such as
recruitment—which included interviewing; recording, sharing, and reviewing feedback; making offers;
training new employees—and annual employee reviews. Regarding workforce development, the team
focused on the engagement needs of executives. In the past, executives had managed and engaged with
teams in person, by walking around. Now, they would need to engage digitally. It was especially important
to do this right; even more engagement and empathy were needed because many employees were taking
No

care of sick relatives or kids. The solution needed to allow executives to model appropriate behaviour,
enhance the cadence of communication, and provide accommodation to employees facing hardships. The
team started experimenting with internally developed virtual technology to conduct online meetings. The
initial results showed that employees felt that they really were in the meeting rooms with their managers
and were able to connect and engage with them.

FOCUSING ON AGILITY AND PERMANENTLY CHANGING WORKFORCE PROCESSES

The need for agility with scale forced Meta to build home-grown solutions. According to Banerjea, in a different
context and given less urgency or other pressing priorities, it was possible—perhaps even likely—that he would
have looked at external solution providers. Prior to the pandemic, Enterprise Engineering routinely investigated
external solution providers and, even if the products did not immediately meet Meta’s need or scale, the vendors
were typically willing to adapt. The pandemic dramatically accelerated the need for agility, and Meta did not
have time to wait for the vendors to catch up. Plus, unlike many other firms, it had the in-house talent to quickly

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 6 W33549

t
create MVP solutions and keep iterating. What Banerjea and his team did not anticipate was that the home-

os
grown digital tools and associated process changes would become permanent.

Even after the recruiting team went back to the office, it permanently adopted the digital recruitment tool.
According to the recruiting team, the new digitally transformed process just worked better. Similarly, the
annual performance review tool changed this process: now, managers used the tool because it was more

rP
convenient and effective than the in-person process. Banerjea wondered whether these transformations
would even have occurred if the company had gone through the traditional request for proposal (RFP) cycle
with vendors or adhered to standard management principles: “Perhaps participating in building the MVP
ship at high speed, while sailing it, permanently changes how people work.” It was not as if Meta was
ignoring industry-standard digital platforms. For example, it used the Microsoft Office suite, including
Outlook, and Google for document collaboration.

yo
Still, the above digital transformation results were hard to ignore. Several pandemic-generated digital solutions
made it into Workplace, Meta’s enterprise communication platform. For example, the employee safety check
provided a way to contact employees when there was a disaster to find out if they were safe and, if not, get them
help. Prior to this solution, it had taken three to four days to contact everyone, but now, it took 12 hours.
Similarly, Enterprise Engineering created a digital knowledge-management tool for remote employees because
they could no longer just walk up and ask questions of a colleague. This tool organized relevant information to
facilitate the onboarding and day-to-day operations of remote workers. The team also created an event platform,
which could scale up to thousands of simultaneous users, and its own whiteboarding application.
op
Banerjea, while reflecting on the digital transformation and change processes, wondered if the need for
agility had permanently changed the calculus of build versus buy. In other words, if building enabled
change, allowing quicker acceptance and improved processes, then perhaps that was an important factor to
consider going forward.
tC

THE FUTURE OF WORK

When Meta reopened its offices, the company committed to remote work as a key part of the employee life
cycle (see Exhibit 1). In a blog post in early 2021, Meta said it would open remote work to all levels at the
company, with a commitment to “learn and make adjustments as needed.”13
No

Meta’s Enterprise Engineering team said the “new world of work, which will be hybrid with a big part of
the workforce remote, will bring its own challenges and benefits.” “We are never going to go back to where
we are in person every day, nor go back to 100 per cent in-person onboarding in Menlo Park,” said Banerjea.
“The new phase we’re in is different than before.”14

Management had also had to adapt to more asynchronous approaches, whereby work would get done in
smaller workstreams or by individuals and would then need to be brought together in a cohesive manner by
utilizing many different or new communication channels and tools. Along the way, Melasippo said that
Meta’s management styles changed. Prior to the pandemic, it had usually been the loudest voices in the
Do

room that were heard, but remote work provided more equity, which allowed various personality types to
shine: “Remote work enabled new ways for employees to contribute, and many of the tools we built gave
more equity for different personalities to elevate themselves.” It also changed behaviour across different

13
Meta Platforms Inc., “What Remote and Flexible Work Will Look Like at Meta,” Meta (blog), June 10, 2021,
https://www.metacareers.com/life/what-remote-and-flexible-work-will-look-like-at-meta/.
14
Banerjea, April 7, 2022.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 7 W33549

t
units: “In crises, we don’t stay in our swim lanes. We all blend together and get whatever is needed

os
regardless of team.”15

Ruggiero added that Meta was a microcosm of an ongoing shift in management thinking about how to
manage and motivate talent, noting that “management science has to evolve” to better understand and
leverage the new tools for engaging remotely.16 Wilson noted, “We believe in strongly enabling

rP
productivity at scale through processes that emphasize quality and velocity,” adding that the pandemic had
further “baked in” agile processes and thinking.17

De Boysson summarized the spirit of the team: “The best thing was that boundaries melted away amongst the
teams; everybody was trying to solve things for the greater good. Nothing was everybody else’s problem.”18

Looking back, Banerjea was satisfied with how Enterprise Engineering had responded to the pandemic

yo
by digitally transforming workforce management. However, it also seemed clear that the crisis had been
the catalyst for changing behaviours and opening doors. He wondered, “In the post pandemic, what is
going to stick and what will we need to switch or evolve in a completely new direction?” 19 He wondered
whether the accelerated shift to building the company’s own tools was sustainable in the context of
maintenance needs, partnerships, and corporate focus or if its participative agile MVP approach could be
institutionalized as both a software engineering and a change management tool.
op
tC
No
Do

15
Carissa Melasippo (Chief of Staff and Director, Business Operations, Meta Platforms), in discussion with case authors, May
24, 2022.
16
Steve Ruggiero (VP Enterprise Operations, Meta Platforms), in discussion with case authors, June 15, 2022.
17
Anil Wilson (VP of Enterprise Engineering, Meta Platforms), in discussion with case authors, June 15, 2022.
18
Jean de Boysson (Director, Enterprise Infrastructure and Security, Meta Platforms), in discussion with case authors, June 15, 2022.
19
Banerjea, April 7, 2022.

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860
 Page 8 W33549

t
EXHIBIT 1: META EMPLOYEE LIFE CYCLE

os
rP
yo
op
Source: Company documents.
tC
No
Do

This document is authorized for educator review use only by Christian Pangaribuan, HE OTHER until May 2025. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860