5 ways Workplace is helping make work more human
Workplace is 5 years old! To mark our birthday celebrations, we’re shining a candle on the future of work and five ways we’re helping shape it.
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When we launched Workplace five years ago, the world of work was very different.
Information-sharing between knowledge workers was hit and miss (and sharing information with frontline or deskless workers was mainly a miss). Leaders found it hard to connect and engage with people imprisoned behind the ‘reply-all’ gate created by email. IT stacks contained hundreds of applications that didn’t talk to each other. People found themselves working in silos, so they didn’t talk to each other, either. Tough times.
The power of community at work
Today, most enterprise companies will tell you they care about people. And that makes sense given everything we've all been through. But go back five years, was anyone else able to empower people to build better, stronger connections on a platform they loved because, as according to Walmart CIO Clay Johnson, “it just works”?
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Since announcing Walmart as a customer in 2017, Workplace is now deployed to over 1 million Walmart associates
We've always believed people come first. We've always cared about the experience people have at work. And we've always been on a mission to build community at work because we understand, in a way that other companies didn't (perhaps still don’t), that the work “you” was always the real you, and vice versa.
Five years ago, this was a hard sell.
It took early, visionary leaders to trust us and come onboard. It was hard to explain the 'Workplace Effect' - you just knew it when you felt it. But we saw our customers empowering people to turn their companies into communities and had faith that the rest of the world would soon see it, too.
Today, it's not just visionary leaders who believe in putting their people first. It's everybody at every organization. We’re proud to be here helping them - here are five ways we’re doing it.
Untangle work with Workplace
From informing everyone about the return to the office to adopting a hybrid way of working, Workplace makes work more simple.
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1) Helping connect companies of all sizes
We’re bringing the power of community to everyone at work. And that means everyone - in any company of any size. Since 2016, some of the world’s most innovative organizations, including Walmart, Vodafone, Banco Galicia and Vision India Foundation, have now experienced that Workplace effect. In the past year we’ve welcomed companies including BT, C&A, English National Opera, Petco, Sephora and Virgin Australia along with countless local businesses.
Today, we’re helping to connect over 7m paying subscribers in companies of all shapes and sizes so they can more easily talk and work together. It’s a connective superpower that’s helping many organizations to navigate the pandemic and convincing more still to deploy Workplace for the first time.
2) Helping build connected and integrated companies
The days of having 100s of applications working in isolation are numbered. Quite right, too - people don’t want to be restricted to one platform and prefer to choose the tools that work best for their company.
So we’ve spent the last five years building an integrated system where Workplace connects people with the tools they already know, love and use every day.
Whether that’s using integrations with leading business tools like Office 365, Google Workspace and ServiceNow, or building their own custom versions, companies now have a way to connect all the tools they rely on. And that means a better, smarter employee experience for everyone.
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Some of our partners
Building new features for a new future
And it's not just integrations. Since 2016, we’ve launched over 200 familiar and easy to use tools like improved Live video and Knowledge Library. All designed to connect employees from the top of an organization to those on the ground, and from knowledge workers to those on the frontline.
Just this year, we’ve released features that help leaders connect at scale, employees to engage, and people to express themselves in more authentic and meaningful ways.
3) Helping people navigate the changing world of work
The world of work ain’t what it used to be. So we’ve been finding ways to help organizations stay ahead of the curve. Why? Because no matter who you are, what you do or where you do it, business is better when people are connected.
We think there are three critical bits to this.
Connecting the frontline
The first is to close the gap between frontline employees. It’s quite a gap to close: 61% of frontline managers say there’s a disconnect in communication with head office. So we’ve built tools like Shift Cover to give essential frontline workers ways to swap shifts on top of other features that help them work smarter, find information and send messages.
By doing so, we’re helping companies like Honest Burgers to connect all frontline staff working in restaurants in ways that are not only useful and interesting but also, “a really joyful experience for our people.”
Supporting remote workers
Remote working was a rapidly growing trend before 2020, but now it’s business-critical. So we’re helping people stay connected even when they’re apart through Live video, chat threads and our Portal smart devices. That’s how companies like Delivery Hero were able to stay connected using Workplace to share vital updates on new policies and procedures when they had to shift to remote working almost overnight.
Building hybrid teams
The future of work will be more distributed and increasingly hybrid. So we want to level the playing field for workers wherever they are (and whatever device they use) to make work more democratic.
An approach that is enabling agriculture company Olam to bring its global workforce together, and why it views Workplace as an essential tool as it shifts towards a hybrid work strategy.
4) Helping get the right information to the right people
We’re talking guaranteed reach. Information flowing to every corner of the organization. The general leveling-up of your leadership comms. That’s why since 2016, we’ve been building features like company-wide Groups, Knowledge Library and Mark as Important to make sure the right information flows to the people who need it most.
Like at Code Ninjas, where people use Workplace features like Draft For in Groups to quickly share critical announcements or updates so that all franchisees are bang up to date.
5) Helping turn company comms into a company conversation
Remember that time when someone replied all to a company-wide email and you really enjoyed the conversation?
Of course you don’t.
That’s why we’re building features that make the company conversation a lot less top-down and a lot more two-way. We’re doing it using live video Q&As, automatic translations of posts into multiple languages, and instant, transparent feedback from Comments. The result is better feedback from people on the ground and - in the case of National Australia Bank - the ability to, “make fast decisions that ensure we are responding for our customers.”
Here's to the next five
It’s been quite the ride. Thank you to all our customers, partners and the Workplace team on the journey with us. Let’s raise a glass!
But once we’ve emptied the prosecco bottles and cleared the balloons away for another year, rest assured we’ll continue our mission to bring the power of community to everyone at work. Our search for better and smarter ways to connect people and teams will go on. And we’ll work hard every day to make work a little more human.