Metaverse Division Eliminations to be Made

The company will eliminate a total of 50 jobs, which will be part of the first of 3 rounds of layoffs to erase costs. There are many companies focused on developing a virtual environment in which users interact with each other. Meta is the great exponent, however, that does not erase the fact that others try to do their development, although not each of them achieves their goal, as has happened to Disney after deciding to close its metaverse development separation.

Disney removes all metaverse separation

Once a segment is new, each company in a sector tries to enter it in any way. This takes time and resources to produce a product that convinces users, but sometimes everything fails for one reason or another. And don’t think that this happens in small companies, it also happens in the most powerful firms as you are seeing.

Disney is one of the most important brands in the entertainment sector and for this reason he thought at the time that it was a good initiative to set up a division focused on the metaverse. However, his efforts seem to have come to nothing as the company plans to remove this department.

The truth is that the company is going through a bad time, as is happening to others in the technology sector. The purpose is none other than to make 3 rounds of layoffs in which 7,000 jobs will be lost and they will save 5,500 million dollars in costs, for which The Verge counts. This is related to the part of the metaverse, those 50 positions will not be restored despite the hard work in which they have been immersed for years.

“The Next Huge Frontier of Storytelling”

In this way, the former CEO, Bob Chapek, was named to the metaverse. The aim was to use all the brand’s content and franchises in a new interactive environment for users, which would provide new encouragement to give their content on other types of platforms as well as produce a much more dynamic and present new one if possible.

Everything shows that it will take a long time to see said progress if it sees the light of day. Meanwhile, the company will have to discover a way to get more productivity out of its VOD service, contributing all the traditional ones from its video library, in addition to what other franchises like Star Wars or the FOX production company, which is the one that carries one of the most popular series. relevant to the whole story: The Simpsons.

Layoffs at Big Tech Are the End of Special Job Perks

Until March of last year, Meta employees in New York didn’t have to worry about food, transportation, or laundry; These were part of the labor benefits. Some buses took them home at the end of the day, a free dinner service with takeaway options, and, in addition, they collected their dirty clothes.

“It’s a space with a lot of attention,” says Devi, a show creator at the Manhattan offices, who requested that her name be changed so as not to jeopardize the future of her career.

However, that same March 2022, as part of a cost reduction program, the laundry service was eradicated and the daily dinner service was delayed until after the last bus left the corporate center, which meant that the workers they had to choose between eating or returning to housing for free. According to Devi, the case caused a huge stir.

“It’s been fun to see a lot of high-paid people in the tech world complain about losing their free food. Since dinner was served to them at work, some of them had rented apartments in expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan, and so far, they weren’t happy.”

he exclaims. Job perks, from cutting-edge gyms to private concerts to sushi bars, have become somewhat integral to the culture of huge tech organizations. Although they may seem outrageous in a time of layoffs across the industry, they are expected by employees and professionals say cutting them could have a real effect on companies’ role in hiring and retaining talent in the future.

Benefits in times of mass layoffs

“The problem for these companies that want to keep their megastars happy is that they’ve gotten used to being offered amazing packages. This can play into the war for wits, so the organizations that will offer the best benefits will get the best employees.”

suggests Grace Lordan, Associate Instructor in Behavioral Sciences at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. Technological organizations began to provide benefits at a time when the parameters between the professional and personal lives of workers were fading. But Silicon Valley has been beyond the ping-pong tables. At Facebook, certain employees had thought tanks; Apple workers have biweekly beer parties and the occasional surprise of some melody legend. On Google they recommended ‘massage credits’, to be redeemed on the premises. The initiative was not just to keep staff in as long as possible in the workplace.

“Creativity and innovation usually arise in favorable spaces, places where the population can interact with pleasure, even during their break. Many of the raw elements that make up the fabric of creative ideas and positive engagement emerge, not during formal meetings, but in informal gatherings, like in the cafeteria or on the volleyball court.”

says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London. From then on, job benefits in the office were part of the marketing discourse of big technology companies to capture ingenuity.

“If your office looks like a 5-star resort with everything integrated, there is a greater chance that employees will feel proud to work there, absorb the culture, have a feeling of belonging and spend more time inside. Bringing points from the non-union sphere to the workplace consolidates the idea that working is an integral section of your life, integrating your rest and personal recreation.”

added Chamorro-Premuzic.

Conclusion

But the pandemic disease and the growth of remote and hybrid work models have come to define the effect of office perks. A study on Glassdoor, the web portal for anonymous company reviews, verified well over 70,000 postings from tech workers in the United Kingdom. It found that 8.3% of the reviews in 2019 said those benefits, such as the gym or free food. By December 2022, that number had dropped to just 4%.