Stuart Logan, Chief HR Officer at SoftServe explains how his company has utilised Workplace by Facebook to help its global employees stay in touch
In October 2016, Facebook announced the launch of its corporate social network, Workplace. People work in different ways, and Workplace’s mission is to help them stay connected. For SoftServe, a global digital services company with offices across Europe and the USA, it became a chance to connect employees through a new tool with a familiar platform.
The background
Our company’s focus on digital transformation on all levels of its operations has a big impact on internal processes. While offering services to clients, we are fostering the same digital approach internally. We wanted to find an appropriate tool that would scale our growth and satisfy current and future communication needs.
The implementation
The Workplace implementation process lasted a month, with 17 team members involved from our legal, IT, information security and communications teams. The first step toward adjusting Workplace’s group-based communication approach was to design a group matrix.
Then we proceeded to an ‘Early Champions’ stage. We selected around 400 active employees as ambassadors to create groups, fill them with interesting and relevant content prior to the launch and promote the tool afterwards. To create buzz around the launch, we distributed informal teasers and a series of emails. The IT team made sure that all employee profiles were ready and filled with basic information before users first visited Workplace. On the day of the launch, a Q&A group was created for employees to ask questions regarding the network.
The results
More than six months later, we have 87 per cent active users (30 per cent visit the platform one or more times per day, 30 per cent several times per week, and the remaining 40 per cent at least once per month). We have 200-plus active groups and counting.
Thanks to Workplace, our employees and management have become closer, and communication between them has become more systematic and frequent. We chat, tell jokes, discuss news, go live and brainstorm simultaneously and asynchronously within one environment. The tool also turned out to be a very effective recognition platform, where positive feedback about SoftServe employees is shared companywide and employees are able to receive immediate congratulations from management.
The future
Workplace perfectly meets SoftServe’s internal communication needs, and in many ways even exceeds our initial expectations. We see an opportunity to explore the relationship of how digitally engaged an employee is with other data analytics, such as performance and attrition, as well as using machine learning algorithms to see if there are other insights that could help improve communication and collaboration. We also see the opportunity to create a socially-driven employee recognition platform that would be intrinsically connected to Workplace.
We look forward to becoming even more successful during our digital transformation process, and we believe Facebook is a critical partner and Workplace a critical tool in our ecosystem to support our associates and SoftServe’s growth.
