The next time you see a colleague checking his newsfeed on Facebook at work, don’t worry. Most likely he is working on an important assignment given by his boss and he is taking down the notes shared to him on his official Facebook Workplace account.
Yes, Facebook doesn’t only want to be your personal social network, but is now ready to be part of your ófficial’ life too.
On 10th October 2016, the company launched a new enterprise version of Facebook called “Workplace“ to support chat and collaboration within businesses.
Now, more than 1,000 organizations around the world use Workplace (previously known as Facebook at Work). People have created nearly 100,000 groups and the top five countries using Workplace are India, the US, Norway, UK and France.
With an interface very similar to the Facebook main app, Workplace offers its widely popular features such as
• Status Update – users can post about their work,
• Newsfeed – follow a feed of colleagues’ updates,
• Groups – discuss projects in groups which can be within your Company or even Multi-company,
• Chat – Chat with other colleagues on projects, issues or anything
• Live Video – watch a live video broadcast by a company executive, and
• Search – users can search for answers, past posts or files
Most importantly, Workplace accounts are ad-free and are separate from the users’ personal Facebook accounts, and vice versa, ensuring security and privacy concerns amongst Company decision makers.
To ensure that employees don’t misuse, Workplace also looks different from Facebook’s main app with a more subdued, gray color scheme and has a separate login to the Users’ personal Facebook account.
The service is FREE for non-profits and educational institutions, while companies have to pay between $1 – $3 per month for actual active users.
While there are many popular collaborative work tools such as Slack and Jammer, Workplace by Facebook could be the game changer, considering that it’s the most popular social platform and is used by over 20% of the world’s population everyday.
With such a large user base, and huge familiarity with its basic features amongst users, organisations would benefit from using this simple collaborative tool, which would gain immediate acceptance amongst employees.
Also, educational institutions could immensely benefit from Workplace, given the immense popularity of the social platform amongst the young generation and use it for powering their virtual campus.
More info on Workplace is available here.
