Steve Crescenzo in his blog post “What does ‘engagement’ mean in the communications world?”, questions the role of engagement consultation companies in improving engagement between employees in the company. He shows an example that raises the problem that actually an improvement in engagement between employees often doesn’t result in productivity, rather it results in a more unproductive environment. Now, Facebook by introducing Workplace, an application introduced to improve positive engagement and communications in a company.

Workplace, a messenger app by Facebook has created a new possibility for communication company culture. This app has integrated “social media into the professional setting”. The new app works by connecting employees in a company like the regular Facebook messenger app, but with an additional integration with work applications such as the Microsoft office applications and the ability for employees to add different tabs to conversations, so that they’re able to switch between work applications and people very easily. The vice president of Workplace, Julien Codorniou said “Our vision is for Workplace to be an employee’s command center for everything that’s happening with their team, their company and their industry, no matter what type of company or industry that is”. The aim of this company is to develop a culture of communication that is professional and focused to the goal of their company. Workplace as an application has a potential to eliminate all potential communication problems that employees would have to each other. This could potentially remove the barriers between departments and department, or even the intern and the CEO. With the removal of the barrier between employees, this could improve the flow of ideas that would result to an improvement in a company’s overall communication efficiency.

Introducing this new application, some might suspect that companies wouldn’t want to apply Workplace to their company operations because of the learning curve that employees have to experience to get to know this new app. But in a time that is continuously introducing new social media applications and technology, I think it would be easy for the employees to learn how to use the application and integrate it to their workplace.

Companies have shown improvements in communications after using the application. “When unprecedented hurricanes struck the US, Delta used Workplace to coordinate their disaster response and real-time communications. Delta also used Safety Officer, a bot by ServiceRocket, to account for Tampa Customer Engagement Center employees”. And also a hotel chain in China called Ginger hotels have uses Workplace to execute credit and air travel approvals. After using the application, they’ve seen a result of 50% increase in productivity.

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References

Bragg, T. (n.d.). How Workplace by Facebook is encouraging a company culture of communication. Retrieved November 11, 2017, from http://techwireasia.com/2017/11/how-workplace-facebook-encouraging-company-culture-communication/

Crescenzo, S. (2016, January 13). What does ‘engagement’ really mean in the communications world? Retrieved November 11, 2017, from https://crescenzocomm.com/blog/1832-2/#more-1832