Workplace by Facebook: A virtual workplace to foster an open communication culture between employees

One of the biggest challenges faced by organizations across the globe during the coronavirus pandemic is disrupted communication and collaboration between employees. To build a company culture that promotes transparency and nurtures collaboration, it’s important that people within and outside the team working together must make real connections and work in collaboration. Workplace by Facebook is a great tool to improve internal communication and collaboration. It also provides the employees in an organization with a single platform for sharing innovative ideas, accessing a wide range of information, and amplifying the reach of their content.

Workplace helps companies create internal social networks that allow their employees to do video chat, post, comment, and create groups for work-related discussions and collaborations. Such open communication between team members enables seamless collaboration, increases visibility on projects, improves teamwork skills, boosts accountability among team members, and streamlines communication. Some of the reasons why Workplace is a must-have tool for employees in an organization are:

1. Communication is the key

The most distinct feature of Workplace by Facebook is its ability to enable instant messaging and communication easier for the employees. Workplace chat gives the team the ability to communicate with one another directly and share files, images, video messages, documents, and audio clips with anyone within the company. The platform also allows making groups of people from the same department or having common interests.

2. Knowing where you stand is equally important

One of the important features of the Workplace platform for employees is the Org Chart. As the name suggests, the chart displays the professional details of all the employees in the organization and where they fall in the overall company hierarchy. The Org chart can help employees make connections, reach out to anyone, and put a face to a name.

3. Everyone wants to be seen, heard, and recognized

The Workplace platform gives everyone a voice and the tools to get seen, heard, and noticed. Acting as one global network on a single technology platform, Workplace allows employees to efficiently communicate, share knowledge and success stories, ask questions, discuss challenges, and learn from each other.  The commenting feature allows team members to engage and communicate their opinions about important updates or announcements, making them feel like they’re working toward a common goal.

4. Not knowing a language shouldn’t be a constraint

With a globally dispersed team and clients, Workplace’s Auto Translate feature is a boon. It helps employees connect and communicate with their peers and clients around the world without having to worry about the language barrier. The auto translations make it convenient to share important ideas and information that everyone can understand by enabling every employee to translate posts in their news feed into their respective native language.

5. A different perspective is always welcome

The collaboration enabled by Workplace allows employees to gain insight, feedback, quick response, and different perspectives on their ideas and work from the entire team, all at one place. This not only saves time but also improves the quality of work.

6. You might not have a laptop with you all the time

With businesses having a global presence and distributed employee groups, remote working has become the new norm. Gone are the days when employees were being tied to a desktop or laptop for connecting with colleagues or sharing important files. The globally dispersed workforce, working in different time zones has made way for a new mobile-led world that makes working anytime, anywhere possible. Workplace has a full-featured mobile app with a seamless app experience to help you keep in touch on the go.

Let’s look at some real scenarios to understand how Workplace can be beneficial for employees in an organization.

1. Collaboration that gives meaningful insights and goes a long way to improve existing products, services, processes, and experiences

You are a marketing expert in your company and have been asked to create an ad to promote the Cybersecurity services and solutions being offered by your company. You did some online research on how to present the ad for a better reach and representation. Before starting with the creation of the ad, you decided to post the pointers gathered by you in your workgroup asking for inputs form the members of the team. Surprisingly, you got some relevant and crucial information that you missed out on when doing your research.

Once you have created the video ad, you thought of sharing it on the Workplace newsfeed with a small description about the video and its use, soliciting everyone’s feedback on the video and the improvements required, if any. You got an overwhelming response, reactions, and appreciation on your work from some while some suggesting a few changes to make it better. The feedback received not only gave you different perspectives on your ad but also promoted cross-departmental engagement and collaboration to transform good ideas into great ones.

2. Recognize employees who are making a difference and motivate others with their success stories through a Live Video streaming

A positive work culture requires motivated employees working towards a common goal of ensuring the success of their team and company. As a manager, you understand that employee recognition lets them know that their contribution is valued and keeps them motivated to continue great work. You make it a point to arrange a small get-together and give away a performer of the month award to keep your team members motivated. With Workplace Live video feature, you can broadcast and share these stories with other teams and get them involved in the celebration by watching, commenting, and reacting to these live events.

3. Overcome language barriers to break down silos, share innovative ideas and collaborate

You have been recruited by an MNC through campus placement and you are new to the corporate culture. You are a technically sound software engineer but lack communication skills and hence were finding it difficult to understand, interact, share ideas, or collaborate with your globally dispersed team members. With the auto-translate feature in Workplace by Facebook, you can easily translate whatever is being discussed with a click of a button in your native language and can share your inputs or thoughts about it and collaborate in a better and efficient way.

Conclusion

Due to the lack of a collaboration tool, employees in any organization end up spending too much time, effort, and energy in searching for relevant resources and information or connecting with the right person at the right time. From enabling better conversations and knowledge sharing to multiple channels for feedback such as reactions, likes, and comments, Workplace by Facebook is the perfect platform for employees to contribute and socialize their ideas, and share knowledge and information.