Facebook Workplace: The good, the bad, and the distracting – Enterprise leaders must decide if it’s right for their culture

Collaboration tools and platforms are very much in vogue, and even Facebook is getting in on the act in a big way. But in some cases, increased collaboration doesn’t equal boosted productivity. Enterprise leaders must decide if collaboration tools like Facebook Workplace make sense in their business or if they instead enable distraction and hostile work environments for their teams.

A few years ago, Facebook launched Workplace, its collaborative work platform for businesses, to move into enterprise IT by emulating its social media platform. The platform’s mission is to increase connectivity from the bottom to the top of an organization by replacing traditional forms of communication such as email and dreaded phone calls.

By and large, the platform has been a success, reaching two million paid subscribers across a prestigious client list that includes Starbucks, Save The Children, Spotify, and Walmart. Nonetheless, despite being a useful tool, there are inherent problems with Workplace and similar collaborative platforms, such as being a distraction and favoring the overconfident.

Connectivity is good—it enables news and information to spread easily and quickly

On the positive side, integrated collaboration platforms such as Workplace tend to offer the whole gamut of communication options such as direct messaging, voice and video calls, live streaming, and a timeline. This integrated interface helps employees avoid the hassle of picking up a phone or shifting between communication applications.

Workplace benefits from its high familiarity among most users because of its similarity to Facebook. It’s certainly not the only enterprise communication channel vying to replicate the successes of social media— in many cases, these platforms are unsuccessful, such as Yammer’s attempt to emulate Twitter’s success. The objective of these platforms is to boost employee connectivity and collaboration by reducing the friction other enterprise technologies create—and why shouldn’t we be able to reach out as easily to accounting in our professional lives as we spam our friends with memes in our personal ones?

Timelines and live-streaming allow for staff to express themselves, creating an impression of community within an organization. Every employee will be able to see, hear, or speak to executives or different departments, allowing staff to have a better understanding of the entire organization and its goals. And, thanks to personalized user profiles, we’ll all know what our executives’ pets look like. (And, if you’re honest enough to put a real picture of yourself in your profile, you won’t be able to hide from the angry IT guy when you’ve typed in the wrong password too many times.)

This all sounds great, and for some enterprises it really is. In its 2017 shareholder meeting, Starbucks pointed out that a single store manager chatted on his timeline about the influx of requests for a selection of non-standard beverages. Concerned that he was not delivering them in the best way possible, he asked his peers for help. Cue an internal epiphany as countless other managers jumped in to discuss the increased demand for the very same drinks. By the end of the day, the Starbucks category marketing team had seen the post and created an official recipe, adding the drinks to the menu by the next morning. Who knows, the standardization of your favorite coffee might be down to some social-media-esque collaboration. So that’s a win for collaboration software, right?

Buzz, buzz, buzz—constant communication is a distraction from work and personal life

Increased engagement, collaboration, and ad-hoc product development sound great. But it’s not all sunshine, rainbows, and pots of gold. We need to wrestle with the fact that platforms like this bring in the successes of social media—and its most annoying characteristics, too.

Obviously, social media is highly addictive, and even the characteristically Luddite Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom are pushing to have the addiction classified as a disease. Strikingly, it has been reported that children are more than twice as likely to suffer from mental health issues because of it. This is the generation that will be looking to join your organization in the future. The reality is that applications like Workplace are being sold as a platform that is familiar for the younger generation to get to grips with, but it’s also the root of a lot of increasingly alarming societal problems.

For one, the platform can foster a false sense of reality. As with social media, users tend to focus on presenting a perfect impression of themselves—a trend linked with a series of devasting psychological disorders. It can also promote a sense of safety, opening your organization up to the same trolling and anti-social behavior you can see on social media (for examples, find your nearest Brexit or Trump debate on Twitter).

Let’s face it, the ability to communicate constantly with your enterprise and work colleagues could be alluring for executives looking to increase productivity. But, the long-term impact of this is a team of tired and stressed staff desperate to escape work and separate their professional and personal lives.

The Bottom Line: The reality is that platforms like Workplace are late to the game, as younger generations move away from Facebook.

Workplace is meant to be a familiar communication tool for younger users because of its similarity to Facebook. But, according to news outlets, Facebook is officially for old people—which makes all of us still using the platform feel great! According to the Guardian, The Newspaper quotes eMarketer and states in 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017. Ultimately, this makes us wonder if the success of collaboration platforms is short-lived as young, bright, professionals steer clear.

The reality is that it’s all about balance. Collaboration tools can be useful and boost communication within an enterprise, promising to save us all from the scourge of emails and unsolicited phone calls from Barry in Marketing asking to “ideate and reimagine” something with him.

But if we’re honest, despite the success of the platform, its usefulness and selling points have been exaggerated by Workplace. Constant and easy communication can intrude into an employee’s life and distract them during their workday. Further, it looks like the benefit of engaging younger workers is far from certain. Simply put, executives must decide if investing in collaboration software makes sense for their enterprise. If you can’t trust your staff not to troll each other and send Borat memes—it’s probably best to stick to email and Skype.