Can you give us a quick rundown of Workplace by Facebook?
Luke McNeal, Head of Workplace by Facebook, Asia Pacific & Japan
Can you give us a quick rundown of Workplace by Facebook?
Facebook’s mission is to bring the world closer together by giving people the power to build community. For most of us, our work lives and professional communities are just as important as our personal lives. After many years of using an internal version of Workplace, we launched in 2016 as a standalone service, but with a lot of consumer Facebook-like features like news feed, posts, chat, and video. Fast forward to today, we have over 30,000 companies that use workplace every month.
30,000 is an impressive number. How is Workplace succeeding where other collaborative platforms have failed?
So we’re really excited about the future of work. This is part of our long term roadmap and why I started the conversation by talking about how core this is to our mission about being able to give people connectivity and community within their work. We are able to learn from Facebook’s family of apps, from understanding how to build community across literally billions of people, and take the elements that makes sense for the enterprise. Whether it’s ten people or ten thousand, communicating more efficiently, collaborating, automating workflows and improving productivity—you know there are opportunities to do a better job. With more millenials in the workorce, we are moving away from traditional office based environments to people working remotely in the field on their mobile device. That’s where I think we can get a lot of value.
Do elaborate…
For example, AirAsia has got nine different airlines across, I think, eleven different markets, and historically, Japanese organizations are very different from the rest of APAC. Using the auto translation feature that is native within Workplace, for the first time, someone that sits in AirAsia in Japan can write in Japanese and have someone that sits at headquarters in Kuala Lumpur be able to read that in Malay. That’s just one example. Another one is what we’d like to call broadcast communications, where a senior leader might want to share a quarterly update newsletter, or perhaps new policies. For many organizations, that’s traditionally been email. But very few people read (email), and the message really isn’t very well disseminated.
But if we already ignore emails, why would we pay attention to a corporate news feed?
Well Facebook has got over a decade of building services that literally billions of people use every each and every day. We’re able to use A.I. and all of the experience we had building news feed algorithms in the consumer world, take that underlying technology and apply that to the enterprise. That then allows workplace to serve the information that’s most relevant. So instead of wading through hundreds of emails on a daily basis, we surface the information that’s most important to you based on how you’re interacting with the tool.
People are bound to start sharing personal things on a social network. Wouldn’t this be detrimental to productivity?
We actually find the opposite. Customers are actually able to increase productivity when they roll out Workplace. And why that’s different from consumer Facebook is that you know by using groups that are topical, being able to communicate, receive comments and share files, teams that don’t sit next to each other in the same office, or perhaps those out in the field with only a mobile device are now able to participate in those discussions. They are able to work much more collaboratively than with traditional technologies, reducing the distance within the organization.
What else is there to achieve for Workplace?
We believe Workplace can be that single point, the command center if you will, for different best-in-breed technologies. For example, we (recently) launched over 50 different SAAS integrations that allow our customers to be able to provide their workers with the ability to retrieve information from the likes of Dropbox, or Box, or other content repositories that are great technologies. I think that’s a big area where we’re going to continue to see the kind of integration that gives people the best tools for the best job. I think the other area we’re going to see a lot, is the role of A.I. as we start to move away from text-based (communication) to more of chat bots or machine learning.
What’s A.I. got to do with work?
One of the features of Workplace is Work Chat, and what’s interesting about this is that we’ve opened up APIs that allow organizations to build bots that can automate certain workflows. Tan Tock Seng Hospital here in Singapore uses this. For example, if you’re a nurse in the hospital, and you need to report a leaky faucet, you (probably) won’t know what number to dial. Now, you can just ask the chat bot and immediately get the information you need.
Some of the largest organizations in the world are trying to break down silos within their organizations, to bring together fragmented workforces wherever they may sit in the world.
Photography Phyllicia Wang
