The rise and rise of Workplace by Facebook

Facebook recently announced that they are welcoming an exciting new customer to the Workplace family — the retail giant Walmart. They’re the world’s biggest private employer, with 2.3 million employees, and it’s an incredible boost for the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) that’s still seen as the new kid on the block.

This is particularly significant because the vast majority of Walmart’s people work on the shop floor. They don’t have email addresses, and unlike their “knowledge worker” counterparts, they’re productive in the physical workplace.

Before Workplace arrived on the scene, ESNs were primarily targeted at ‘white collar’ workers — and there had been little traction on the shop or factory floor. Workplace has already bridged the white/blue collar gap with customers such as Starbucks and Save the Children. This is a watershed for ESNs, who can now connect all kinds of workers to the mothership, opening the way for a host of creative new use cases. Walmart is confident their millions of employees can adopt Workplace and connect with the business in previously impossible ways, driving a host of new business and employee engagement opportunities.

So how has Workplace achieved this? Sei Mani became a Workplace service partner early this year and we’re continually impressed by their approach. They are a force to be reckoned with in the world of work, not just because of their product, but because of a chain of factors that strengthen their whole offering. In this post, I will examine these factors in order:

Mission — Culture — Ecosystem — Team — Product — Price — Reach — User Adoption

Mission

Whatever your reservations about the power of tech giants, they’ve undoubtedly brought marvelous benefits to our lives. At its heart, Facebook has an inherently human and social mission ‘to make the world more open and connected’ and this year, it was expanded by Mark Zuckerberg to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.

It’s easy to see this social mission in action, and whilst never a replacement for in-person contact, Facebook strengthens the invisible lines of connection that hold friends and family together, and in more recent years, Facebook groups have enabled millions of people to form communities of any size, connecting like minds anywhere in the world.

Workplace is an extension of this mission, bringing the power of its phenomenally successful social network to the world of work and making it enterprise ready. Initially, I was skeptical when I first heard of Facebook’s intentions, but I now see the natural connection. Facebook’s mission is social, it concerns humans and how we collaborate — and if we spend a third of our time at work, then why would the mission not apply there? I don’t know of another enterprise offering driven by such a human vision.

Culture

In April this year, I was invited, with two colleagues, to Facebook’s inaugural Partner Summit at their California HQ and though an avid user of the Facebook app for a decade I had neutral opinions about Facebook as a company.

My interest in the Workplace app was growing but I had still to be truly enthused. Meeting their team and experiencing the Workplace culture was nothing short of transformative. Forget about stale conferences with only the occasional engaging speaker. The two days we spent in Menlo Park were as fascinating as they were human.

We saw that their culture arose from a breed of engineers with a healthy disrespect for the impossible — this confident coder attitude pervades the whole organisation, captured by slogans visible on every wall. Not the uninspiring corporate tosh found in many big organisations, but beautifully designed posters capturing the spirit of the people who make Facebook such a phenomenon. Move fast, focus on impact, the job is only 1% done — just some of the values on display.

I’m usually dubious about corporate values that are created centrally, but the Facebook experience showed that their values grow from their people and fire everything they do.

Team

The experience also left us in no doubt about the capability of the Workplace team. We met a friendly group of tech industry veterans accustomed to thinking in billions with a track record of bringing phenomenally successful applications to market. The Workplace team truly believe in the project and have bold plans for achieving a goal of 1 billion Workplace users.

There was a refreshing absence of the arrogance I’ve experienced elsewhere. Facebook know what they do well — groundbreaking digital experiences that people love to use — and yet they’re humble about what they don’t know.

It’s why they entered a beta process to test their offering in unfamiliar territory. It’s why they listened when told that the name “Facebook for Work” was a non-starter in the enterprise, and why they rebranded as Workplace by Facebook.

They know they can’t do it all by themselves and that’s why they want to work with partners who understand the challenges of the enterprise. It’s how they transformed the Facebook experience into a bulletproof corporate application with world-class security that integrates with a host of popular enterprise tools.

Ecosystem

Awareness of what they’re good at and what they need help with, has led the Workplace team to lose no time building an ecosystem of like-minded partners. I’ve experienced many vendor partnerships and the Workplace experience has been truly refreshing — a partner model to die for. They listen and act fast to make their time and resources available. Through this budding ecosystem, we’ve encountered many partners, large and small, and we’re in discussion with several about how we can be successful together.

Product

If you don’t have a compelling mission, inspiring culture, talented team, and strong ecosystem — your enterprise offering will be weakened. Workplace has these in spades, so let’s look at the product.

Like any application, there are strengths and weaknesses, but as the child of Facebook, Workplace inherits over a decade of rapid, data-driven innovation. Facebook quip that they have trained 1.8 billion people to use Workplace, and the widespread familiarity with the product really does result in a faster, stickier uptake — a major strength, though robust adoption planning is still indispensable. Earlier ESNs like Yammer and Chatter, are, on the surface, clones of the Facebook experience, but they cannot emulate the depth of refinement found in the original. Other ESN vendors have failed to deliver continuous, data-driven improvement and the core features have hardly improved in years, to the disappointment and frustration of users.

Does Workplace fully meet the needs of the enterprise? Not in every regard, but it’s quickly adapting and growing so that its formidable core offering becomes the backbone for countless future innovations.

A unique insight into the engineering culture at Facebook did much to persuade me of this. When new features were discussed at the Partner Summit, the Workplace team would sometimes say words to the effect of “I’m not sure the engineers will go for that.”

My puzzlement cleared up when I learned that Facebook engineers only work on what they believe will impact monthly, weekly, and daily usage of the product. They’re not rewarded for shipping code, nor for creating what their managers tell them to. They are rewarded only for making changes that drive up adoption. When they put forward new ideas and features to develop, they are expected to explain why they believe usage will be improved and only if compelling will the team choose to develop. Equally, new features that do not drive usage, or drag it down, are removed. Think about that — crappy features are not allowed to persist. How very different.

Price

Making your stuff easy to buy is a cardinal rule of commerce. It’s staggering that so many vendors have convoluted purchasing systems. Why is it so hard to answer the question “how much will it cost?”

The Workplace success factors have so far been impressive, and their monthly pricing structure is no exception. I’ll let it speak for itself.

It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Pricing that gets progressively cheaper the more people that use it. No longterm contracts and you can walk away when you like. Free for non-profits, schools, colleges and universities. I’ve never seen a simpler pricing model or an easier way to buy.

Reach

Mission, culture, team, ecosystem, product, pricing: check!

All well and good, but can awareness of Workplace by Facebook reach into boardrooms, industry analysis and the minds of workers? Facebook had their work cut out when they announced they wanted to break into the enterprise — they’re everything that’s not enterprise, we laughed. Many months have passed and now, for all of the reasons above, you’d be foolish not to take them seriously. I’ve been surprised by how many of my friends know about Workplace, and have tried the free version. I see far less recognition when I mention Yammer, Chatter, and Jive.

Facebook is a marketing juggernaut, it has enormous resources and a formidable professional network through the high performing business and tech personalities it employs — and they’re just getting started with Workplace. They’re having conversations with the world’s most powerful brands at the highest levels and marketing jointly with partners. It’s clear their reach is enormous.

User adoption

The final success factor is user adoption. At Sei Mani we live and breathe adoption, which we define as the effort required to ensure the benefits of a technology investment are realised by the buyer.

Adoption is not a trivial exercise, it requires careful thought and serious investment, and when done properly its value eclipses the cost in obvious and provable ways. Our services drive exceptionally high user participation, creating new business value for our clients and improving work life for employees.

We see a bright future for Workplace — they have a powerful vision supported by culture, team, ecosystem, product, pricing and reach. But ultimately, their obsession with end-user engagement chimes so well with our core belief that users don’t act for anything less than value.

Give them a poor experience and they won’t hang around.

Originally posted by sei-mani.com