Facebook Says Workplace App is Uniquely Positioned To Aid Remote Work

Workplace by Facebook

Facebook added features to its Workplace app in a bid to help companies support their employees and improve communication in the new world of remote work. The company believes its history building consumer products puts in a unique position to help employers develop and maintain their culture across a distributed workforce.

By enhancing the app, Facebook is trying to be taken more seriously as a workplace tool. It’s a logical time to do so, as millions of workers enter their second month of operating out of their homes on a daily basis.

.@Facebook says it's in a unique position to help employers develop and maintain culture across a distributed workforce. <insert emoji here> #HR #HRTech Click To Tweet

That situation won’t reverse itself anytime soon. Even though several states are moving ahead to ease shelter-in-place orders, several opinion polls show that both businesses and workers are more conservative than state officials when it comes to returning to activities that were once considered “everyday.”

Consumer Experience for Remote Work

Among Workplace’s new features, as reported by Business Insider, is a Knowledge Library containing HR policies, employee guidance and other information. There’s also a Campaigns tool that tracks employee sentiment and promotes internal messaging, and a “Draft for” feature to help communications staff draft posts on behalf of corporate leadership.

The app’s video-chat and livestreaming features have also been enhanced, BI said.

The Knowledge Library offers a safety alert that companies can use to broadcast messages to employees, whether they’re on-premise or remote, and a Q&A feature where company leaders can answer employee questions.

The theme of all this is “making sure employees, no matter where they are, whether they’re frontline or they’re working from home … they’re all being brought into the company’s community,”

“What’s common between all of them is making sure employees, no matter where they are, whether they’re frontline or they’re working from home … they’re all being brought into the company’s community,” Karandeep Anand, vice president of Workplace from Facebook, told BI.

Anand didn’t provide BI with any specific numbers, but he said response to Workplace has been “amazing.”

Facebook argues that it’s uniquely suited to helping employers adapt to the new workplace conditions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic because it fosters “authentic connections.”  “We focused on authentic connections, we focused on expression, we focused on two-way communication, we focused on how do we encourage people to share more snippets and live in video,” he said. “All of fifteen years of social engineering that’s gone into Facebook consumer is packaged into Workplace.”

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