Is 'Workplace by Facebook' the 'Holy grail' of Corporate Communication and Collaboration space?

Is Workplace going to disrupt the corporate communication and collaboration space just the way Facebook and WhatsApp disrupted the social networking? Is Workplace the holy grail which  many corporates are looking for? Would this help corporate systems stay relevant to their current and future employees? Would Workplace make the likes of Slack,  Yammer, Jive and other products irrelevant?

These are some of the questions that have come up in minds of tech watchers and enthusiasts when Facebook launched GA version of Workplace on Monday this week (10th October 2016).  In the initial view Workplace seems very promising and the answer would have been a strong yes to all the above questions,but it would be different if we get into an in-depth analysis.

Workplace currently has over 1000 beta customers and the product offers features like group chats, multi company groups, video calls, live video streaming, news feed, file upload, notifications, search and events which are very simple and intuitive, pretty similar to Facebook but in corporate context. This makes the product easy to use without any training. At the same time this product can integrate with existing authentication setup within an organization. It runs seamlessly as a technology agnostic and relevant corporate communication system. From a pricing standpoint as well it sounds pretty reasonable and it doesn’t have any lock-in period. Workplace is targeting to disrupt the $67billion (as on 2015) ‘business communication software’ market, by banking upon 60 million companies that are active on facebook.

So if organizations want to choose only  a communication and collaboration system that is new age and is relevant to the gen Z and millennials;  going with Workplace would be a suitable option but it will not address the core issues that all the current organizations are facing - they currently don’t have employee data that is relevant, accurate and up to date. Current data capture mechanisms are manual effort intensive, error prone thus making employees disinterested in updating the information. Other important problem for organizations is lack of one single source of truth for employee records which restricts them from utilizing their employees to the best of their abilities.

An ideal ‘Holy Grail solution’ is a system that ensures that

• Employee data is always relevant
• Integrated with all employee interaction points
• It leverages data to provide real time insights
• Allows employees to stay well connected and updated
• Provides self service
• Beautiful by design
• Accessible on mobile

To achieve this ‘Holy Grail’ status Workplace should, either partner with new age solutions that auto capture data, transform all the process to drive process efficiencies and take care of end to end employee life cycle, or build such capabilities within the product.

Executives of organization who want to bring cultural transformation and enhance productivity, need to embrace new age solutions that :

• Help them project themselves as relevant to their employees,
• that are deeply integrated with social channels and other means of employee interaction.
• generate real time insights and
• grow automatically.

So deploying Workspace would enhance the communication and collaboration among employees but the trouble at the core associated with the data and insights would still remain.

Digital Workspaces

This is an era of millennials who are leading a digital life. Research revealed that on an average a person visits his/her mobile over 80 times and spends up to 3 hours on his/her smartphone in a day.

Companies targeting these digital consumers had come up with innovative marketing and sales strategies to get their share in the time spent by the users on their smartphone. Statistics show that companies have become decently successful in attracting 86% of digital users to do online shopping.

But employeer's are on the losing end from the employee engagement front, with this change in user patterns. Firstly they need to make the work space more attractive to make sure that users spend more time at work on work rather than their smartphones and secondly at the same time they need to compete with social media and other e-tailers to get their share of  employees time on smartphones.

Would it be really feasible for organizations to go through this transformation?

Can they prove themselves to their employees that they are new age and relevant to the external digital era?

Educational institutions globally have been decently successful in integrating their systems with social channels to engage digitally with the student, faculty and administration. In this way they proved themselves to be new age and get their share of time on the smart devices.

I imagine the digital workspaces of today to be relevant to the digimans experience. For example when a job aspirant shares his thought of switching his job on facebook. Hiring systems should gather details from social posts, professional information, bio details , identify fitment and come up with the suggestions of his interest, incase they have any suitable opportunities within their organization. Once user applies for a  specific job, the it should auto screen the application, provide acknowledgement and share the details of entire interview process and other details in advance. System should check the availability of user and send invite on social channels for various rounds of interviews. It should remind and provide assistance to prepare for the interview. It should  guide the users to travel for in-person interviews if needed. It should constantly gather feedback on the relevance and quality of interview based on the posts of individual on social channels or based on received feedback and thus work on improvising overall interview experience.

To make such systems a reality, Organizations have a need to embrace the new age systems that are accessible across all devices and  are deeply integrated with social channels and applications like google maps, google now, google calendars. Systems should stay relevant and work as  real time personal assistant and advisor to their employees.