How Facebook is transforming enterprise-level communications

LATEST estimates suggest that there are 7.7 billion people in the world. According to the World Bank, 65.363 percent of the world’s population falls within the “working age-group” of 15 to 64 years.

That means, there are 5.03 billion people around the world that “work”. In contrast, latest figures from Statista suggests that Facebook has 2.27 billion users worldwide.

Obviously, Facebook’s struck a chord with the world’s internet users — and with the launch of Workplace by Facebook a few years ago, the company decided to expand its appeal to enterprises.

The company’s “product” competes with Slack, Google Hangouts, and other purpose-built enterprise-grade communications and collaboration tools, but it has one advantage: Familiarity.

If you’ve taken a look at the Workplace by Facebook homepage of any company, you’ll realize that it all looks the same. It has the same “look and feel” as Facebook — except that it is private and customized to suit the enterprise’s brand.

In an exclusive interview with Head of Workplace by Facebook, Asia Pacific & Japan Luke McNeal, Tech Wire Asia learned about how the company is helping drive change and digital transformation at the enterprise level.

“There is not digital transformation without cultural transformation,” said McNeal, who believes the tool not only fosters communication and facilitates the exchange of ideas but also helps tear down silos to facilitate collaboration.

McNeal also revealed that Workplace by Facebook was also able to help businesses automate simple workflows in order to facilitate large-scale enterprise messages flowing from certain division heads to executives on the ground.

Norwegian retailer REMA 1000’s 23,000 employees, for example, use Workplace to build custom integrations, such as automated product recalls and store manager provisioning — all to help make the company’s communications more “fluid”.

Driving digital transformation with communication

Facebook’s Workplace aims to make it easier to drive digital transformation in the workplace by making communications easier.

One of the features that McNeal says most organizations running Workplace love is ‘live video broadcast’.

“It’s a great tool for senior leaders to humanize themselves, going live to share an important update, some thoughts about the business, or recognize employees for their stellar performance as they meet them during their travels to different business units,” explained McNeal.

At the end of the day, the truth is, digital transformation is driven by culture, not by new technology or sophisticated tools — and smooth communication within the organization accelerates the rate of change.

In fact, one of the most important things that internal communication tools such as Slack, Google Hangouts, and Facebook’s Workplace provides is the ability to collaborate.

McNeal believes that crowdsourcing ideas is becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages for organizations that can develop it, and highlights that the only way to make it work is to ensure that ideas can freely flow up and down the organization.

Whether you’re a bank, a manufacturer, or a service provider, collaboration fosters innovation.

Given the diversity of today’s organizations, their size, and massive geographic reach, it’s important to get the communication flowing if the business wants to stay ahead of the market and retain its competitive edge.

Tools like Workplace help do that quite effectively — driving the company’s digital transformation agenda (through its culture) ahead — quickly and effectively.

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