Workplace from Facebook has outlined three main objectives for 2021 that centre on productivity and wellbeing, Ujjwal Singh, head of product, has told UC Today.
Specifically, the three targets are:
- Increasing who can take part in company-wide dialogue, with a particular focus on frontline workers who often miss out
- Increasing productivity within Workplace from Facebook, rather than having the platform seen as being predominately focused on chat
- Leveraging asynchronous communication
(More on these points later.)
Workplace from Facebook started as an internal tool at Facebook and was officially launched to outside businesses in 2016.
Paid users had reached five million by March 2020 – an increase of over two million from October 2019. Like many other platforms, it has also seen a surge in demand during the pandemic.
High-profile announcements last year saw BT roll out the service to 80,000 employees, while a tie-up with Cisco Webex created a buzz in the UC industry.
Singh says that the success of Workplace is largely driven by its familiarity.
The platform works in much the same way as the consumer Facebook, as do features like posts, comments and likes.
But some elements have been transitioned over and tweaked for a business audience.
Features such as Live have been enhanced to let CEOs broadcast to whole businesses at the click of a button, for example. A recent update means that Live can have multiple hosts at the same time and field questions from viewers.
The Safety Check function – often used during natural disasters so people can let their loved ones know they’re safe – has been added to Workplace as Safety Centre, with a range of COVID-related functionality such local lockdown guidance and announcements on office closures.
Huge parts of Workplace from Facebook are brought in from the consumer platform, but Singh said it’s important the enterprise platform is more tailored.
“We do have people who use consumer Facebook for work purposes, and we don’t discourage that, but we have companies that have stricter requirements around data separation, identity and those sorts of things,” he said.
“That’s partly why Workplace exists; we take the best features that work in consumer and we give them to businesses in a safe way that is more powerful for them”
“The data isn’t mixing, there aren’t any ads – it’s things like that that we keep separate.
“So we have frontline workers using Facebook Groups for things like shift management but that’s an ad-hoc usage of the consumer tools.
“We think we can do a much better job inside Workplace in terms of enabling functionality in a much safer and more direct way.”
It is the focus on frontline workers that makes up the first objective for Workplace this year.
Singh said that many of these workers are inadvertently out of the loop when it comes to company-wide announcement and interactions, in many cases not even having an email address.
Having the Workplace app can help stop these employees feeling isolated, he explained.
Features such as Live have already gone some way to addressing this issue and Singh said we can expect to see more investment in this area this year.
“We’re going to lean more heavily into that,” he said.
“That’s a big area of investment for us in 2021 and we’re going to continue building that out.
“Anyone in a company that has Workplace can post and we’re going to be focused on expanding that to the frontline.”
Increased productivity
Perhaps the most significant of Singh’s three objectives is the aim to increase the amount of work users can carry out from inside the Workplace platform.
Workplace does not want to be seen as an application you chat in, while simultaneously working in another.
Singh said that recently announced integrations with the likes of DocuSign and ServiceNow are proof that Workplace is a tool that can be used to be productive.
“All of the integrations are geared towards making Workplace a place where you can be productive and get work done, not just discuss work,” he said.
“We have 50-plus integrations and you’re going to see us go deeper into those so that Workplace becomes a place that you get work done, especially work that requires you to collaborate with other people.”
Integrations have played a key role in Workplace’ development since it launched, which Singh said creates a differentiator in the market.
In an ever-crowded space, this approach is why he doesn’t see Workplace as going head-to-head with the likes of Slack, G Suite and Office.
“We don’t approach it like we need to go and replace Teams,” he said. “We think we have a pretty unique proposition that connects people.
“Yes there are obvious feature overlaps… but we are not focused on looking at a Microsoft ecosystem or a Google ecosystem. In some ways, we can be a Switzerland and we can integrate across other ecosystems.
“We’re not competing with Office or G Suite – those are things that we will deeply integrate with to allow work to happen inside of our product.”
These integrations are clearly seen in Workplace’s video capabilities, which include partnerships with Zoom, BlueJeans and Webex.
“If a company is already using Zoom or something else we want to be able to work well with that,” Singh said.
“We don’t necessarily think we have to replace the full stack; we think we need to continue focusing on the things that we do really well.
“It’s like I said earlier; we’re not trying to directly compete with a Zoom or a Webex; we’re trying to solve the problem of connecting an organisation’s leaders with their employees and increasing engagement”
Asynchronous communication
Singh’s third objective stems from an acknowledgement that being on video calls all day every day is not sustainable for the vast majority of employees.
Working habits are not going to return to how they were pre-pandemic, he said, with many employees likely to a adopt model.
With this in mind, Workplace plans to leverage more asynchronous communication – meaning communication that does not demand an immediate response from the recipient.
“We’ve all read about the fatigue that comes from having a camera staring at you for 12 hours a day,” Singh said.
“We are going to be leaning into things that leverage that synchronised form of communication, but also async.
“We think it is more scalable for people and will lead to better wellbeing.
“We want to make sure we’re providing tools that allow for sustainable connections and building connections, not just being forced to be on video all the time.
“In general, what we want to do is continue focusing on people building connections with each other. We want to capture the water-cooler moments that we have in the real world.”
