We continue to live in interesting times when it comes to HR Tech, with some of the world’s largest technology companies entering the space in the last couple of years. The strategies of Google and Microsoft have tended to dominate HR Tech conversations but, for me, Facebook’s moves into enterprise software are perhaps even more significant.
My guest this week is Monica Adractas, Global Director of Workplace by Facebook. Workplace now has a client base of 30,000 employers using Facebook technology to help their employees be more connected with each other.
In the interview we discuss:
• The philosophy behind Workplace and the reasons Facebook launched it
• How Facebook used Facebook the product to build Facebook the company
• How speed of change, disruption and complexity are changing employee engagement and communication.
• How technology helps top talent to have impact
• The use of visual technologies at work
• The role of automation and AI in creating seamless daily workflows
Monica also share some use cases from employers using Workplace and gives us her thoughts on the future of work
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Format. Format are the market leaders in providing award winning career sites to employers such as npower, View, Atkins and Muller. The secret to the great results Format delivers for its clients is complete focus on the candidate experience, including long term passive candidate engagement, while at the same time ensuring rock solid and completely seamless integration with the ags. To download Format’s free ebook on planning and implementing a new careers website, go to www.bit.lycareers website or to find out more about their services go to www. Format.com and Format is spelt with the number 4, then M A T.
Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 116 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We continue to live in interesting times when it comes to HR technology, with some of the world’s largest technology companies entering the space. In the last couple of years, the strategies of Google and Microsoft have tended to dominate HR technology conversations. But for me, Facebook’s moves into enterprise software are perhaps even more significant. My guest this week is Monica Adractas, Global Director of Workplace by Facebook. Workplace now has a client base of over 30,000 employers who are using Facebook technology to help their employees be more connected. In the interview we talk about the philosophy behind Workplace as well as the changing nature of employee engagement and communication. Hi Monica, and welcome to the podcast.
Monica Adractas [00:02:11]:
Hi Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Monica Adractas [00:02:19]:
Absolutely. I’m Monica Adractas. I’m one of the leaders for Workplace by Facebook, based here in Menlo Park. Been with Workplace for a couple years now, from the early days to where we are today, and have a history and background in work technologies. Thank you so much for having me here today.
Matt Alder [00:02:40]:
I’m sure everyone listening will have heard of Facebook and probably be a Facebook user, but there may be people listening who’ve not heard of Workplace. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?
Monica Adractas [00:02:52]:
Absolutely. So Workplace is a collaboration platform for work and the idea is to help organizations be more connected and to get work done better and faster. Although Workplace does have familiar Facebook features, it is entirely separate from Facebook. So Workplace has separate websites and separate mobile apps for both Workplace as well as Work Chat. And you don’t need a personal Facebook account to sign up for Workplace. One of the things we love about Workplace is that it does have a lot of the features that users know and love from Facebook, like Newsfeed groups, Facebook, live chat. And so there’s really just no training required as you think about using this technology at work. Our vision, we really, we envision Workplace almost as an employee employees command center where they can just quickly access the information they need, the people they need, learn and engage with their company at the company level, the team level, and even with individuals in small groups. We launched Workplace about a year ago, and today we already have more than 30,000 organizations all around the world. Really, this started from day one as a global initiative across a really wide range of industries. And we see that Workplace is being used on every continent right now in almost 80 languages, and every continent, by the way, including Antarctica, which is pretty cool.
Matt Alder [00:04:39]:
So I actually know quite a few companies who are using. Using Workspace, and I’ve sort of been. Been tracking its development with interest. But I suppose, you know, one of the. One of the questions is why, you know, what was the philosophy behind doing it? Why did Facebook sort of, you know, want to launch a tool like this into the sort of professional space?
Monica Adractas [00:05:02]:
Yeah, I mean, you know, here at Facebook, I think we really believe that people are fundamentally at the heart of organizations, which means that people need to be at the heart of the tools that we have to get work done. If you look at Facebook’s history, back in 2011, Facebook looked pretty much like any other company in that we ran on email, we ran on irc, we had distribution lists, all these closed systems for communication and collaboration. What happened that year in 2011 is that we started creating groups. What we found is that people internally started using groups for work purposes, whether it was to bring a function together or it was to bring a team together. We began using Facebook, the product to build Facebook, the company. Today, Facebook, we have over 20,000 employees and over 50 offices around the world. I think we really, truly believe that we would not have been able to scale this quickly and maintain the open, transparent and agile culture that we believe is our secret sauce had we not had the platform to enable us to do that. Gradually, we came to realize that the lessons we had learned and the technology we had used would probably be useful for other organizations as well.
Matt Alder [00:06:37]:
Absolutely. That’s really interesting, and it’s interesting to hear that it’s something that you grew internally and you grew with a company. Company. I suppose that leads me on nicely to my next question. I mean, how do you feel sort of internal communication within companies and employee engagement for that matter as well, is changing or has changed over the last 10 years? What is it that workplace is sort of tapping into.
Monica Adractas [00:07:05]:
Yeah, I think, Matt, to understand how internal communication and employee engagement is changing, it’s useful first to just take a look at how business is changing. And I think businesses are moving faster, and companies are under a lot of pressure to continue to innovate their business models. If you look at the Fortune 500 in 1955, 88% of the companies that were in the Fortune 500 then are gone today. I think that rate of change and that rate of disruption will only continue and accelerate. Businesses are also getting much more complex, and so they need to move faster, but they also have a lot of complexity to manage. And, you know, that may be complexity in terms of the ecosystem that companies are working with. You know, increasing numbers of partners, vendors, alliances, customers. It may be complexity in the term, in terms of the global reach and nature of the organization. I think companies are expected to have international presence and to grow at earlier stages in their life cycle. And more and more companies take advantage of technology in the sense that they can have remote workers and distributed teams. And so there’s a lot of complexity to manage. And I think for businesses, employee engagement is really important because to be successful, companies have to have the very best talent that’s out there. I think having the very best talent means having technology that enables employees to be productive and have impact. It’s amazing when you think about how technology has changed. I mean, when I started my career, and maybe I’m dating myself a little bit here, but the Palm Pilot had just come out, and I mean, I don’t know if you remember the PalmPilot, it had very sort of archaic writing on individual letters. If we looked at it today, we would laugh at it. We may not even sort of give it to our kids. But at the time, the PalmPilot was revolutionary because all of a sudden it brought mobility and access to information whenever we needed it, wherever we were. And since that time, the rate of technology in the workplace is only accelerated. Whether it’s search and having access to any kind of information when you need it, whether it’s messaging and the ability to get a hold of someone or get a response as soon as you need it, whether it’s social networks or even forums, and being able to access the right people at the right time on specific content, the rate of technology has just really picked up in the work environment. And I think one of the things that we find a little ironic is that our technology at work hasn’t always kept up with the innovation of the technology that we all live and Love in our personal life. One example I always like to use is just how we all are starting to leverage much more visual forms of technology in our personal lives. What used to be an SMS quickly became a photo on platforms like Facebook or Instagram. And now on the Facebook platform, we’re seeing our page views of video just skyrocketing. But if you think about how most of us are communicating at work, you know, more often than not, we’re still using text to communicate, even though we know that our brains process images 60,000 times faster than words. So technology is changing rapidly. It’s changing at work. But work hasn’t always kept up with our personal lives. And I think that’s a significant factor because our work demographics are also changing, and they’re changing in a dramatic way, which is going to have a significant impact on the question that you asked me. Internal communications and employee engagement. You know, my understanding is that 50% of the workforce. 50% is intended to be millennial or is expected to be millennial by 2020. That’s literally two years away. That one in every two people in the workforce is going to be millennial. And I know here at Facebook, we’re actually starting to meet centennials. This is the generation that was literally born online and born mobile. This generation has very different expectations of work. They choose companies because they believe in the mission and culture. They don’t want to work for someone. They want to work for a cause. They want an individualized experience, and they want to feel like they’re having impact at work, which is, again, why the technologies that are provided and the ability to engage, interact, and feel like part of something bigger become so important.
Matt Alder [00:12:40]:
That’s very interesting and also quite nostalgic because I remember having a Palm Pilot and I used to love was brilliant.
Monica Adractas [00:12:47]:
I did too. I did, too.
Matt Alder [00:12:50]:
So could you sort of tell us a bit more? Obviously, there are, you know, there are thousands of companies that are using Workplace. Could you sort of give some examples of some companies that are on the system and how it’s. How it’s working for them?
Monica Adractas [00:13:04]:
So one of the things that’s been really interesting to see on Workplace is that the product really does appeal to a very broad audience, from small SMBs like your local real estate company or nail salon, all the way up to the very large enterprises of the world like Walmart, Starbucks, Danone, Heineken, Reliance. It’s a product that I think is really works for any industry because as it turns out, our focus is people and the heart of any industry or business. Is people with 30,000 customers. Now we’re starting to see some great examples of how customers are using the product. The most obvious way to use the product and what a lot of our customers are doing is using it for broad engagement and communications. One of our partners, Deloitte, did a survey with hundreds of C level executives around this theme of employee engagement. And what they found was that 69% of these C level executives felt that transparent internal communications was critical to them achieving their vision and mission, but that only 14% felt like they had the tools and technology to be able to deliver on that today. So what we’re seeing with workplace, a number of CEOs doing town halls and lives, really using the platform as a way to engage very broad and distributed workforces. So Starbucks, xpo, Danone and others have really used workplace as a way to frankly blow the doors off of their town halls and make them a much more two way engaging experience. Now, instead of receiving an update via email or through sort of a one way broadcast, employees can engage with their leaders through comments and reactions and they can actually get responses to their questions, which is pretty fantastic to see and I think contributes to that open and transparent culture and working environment that we were talking about before. We’re also seeing companies leverage the platform to really enable better and smarter workflows with their employees, even on a team or functional level. Two examples I love we have Agoda, a division of the Priceline group, and they’re using the platform, they have a group around employee assistance. So anytime an employee has a question related to HR policy or how to find, they can simply post that and get a response very quickly. In this employee assistance group, imagine being a new hire, right? And you’re trying to find your way around and you have all these questions. All of a sudden you can get an instant response and everyone in the group benefits from your question. They also have an employee referral program group, which I think is pretty innovative, where HR will post jobs that are maybe looking for that very special unicorn and employees can then recommend friends, family. We know that the best talent comes from employees. Oftentimes.
Matt Alder [00:16:43]:
That’s great. It’s really interesting to see such a broad range of use cases there. Final question, what’s next? What does the future look like for workplace? And what do you think the future looks like for communication within organizations?
Monica Adractas [00:16:58]:
One of the things I think we’re very excited about is the future of automation and the role of integrating workplace with other Systems and leveraging AI to enable more seamless daily workflows. One example I’ll give you. We have a large NGO, Oxfam. By the way, Workplace is free for NGOs and EDUs, so we have quite a few of them on the platform. Oxfam recently launched something that they call the Oxbot, where you can hashtag the bot with an acronym of the company and it will give you an immediate response of what the acronym means in the definition. I think this is really cool because if you think about being, for example, a new hire just recruited into an organization, you literally have to learn the language of an organization. And this now enables those new hires as well as existing employees to ask those questions and get an instant response in the middle of a meeting or wherever they are and also not have to feel exposed while doing so. So we’re very bullish on automation. I think the future will also make it easier for companies to work across ecosystems of other companies. Workplace does have functionality that allows you to collaborate with other companies within a group that we think is quite important. I think finally, fundamentally, our product is going to be driven by the future of work and this need for open openness and transparency. We think the Workplace of tomorrow is going to be connected and it’s going to provide access for all. And we think Workplace really helps break down those silos and makes organizations much more transparent. So we’re excited about the future of Workplace.
Matt Alder [00:18:58]:
Monica, thank you very much for talking to me.
Monica Adractas [00:19:00]:
Thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure to be here.
Matt Alder [00:19:03]:
My thanks to Monica Adractas. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes, in Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, the podcast is also available on that platform. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
