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.