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The clock is ticking for Workplace from Meta customers to move off of the collaboration tool. Meta announced its plans to shutter Workplace back in May, giving customers an Aug. 31, 2025 deadline before functionality ceases.
The urgency to migrate picked up steam in early October, with the Workplace from Meta status reporting disruptions in functionality including workplace chat, the admin panel and login and sign-up.
While Meta selected Workvivo as its preferred migration partner, the answer of where — or even if — to migrate isn’t so cut and dry for Workplace customers. Below are some points to keep in mind before, during and after a migration.
And a note: while the advice was shared in the Workplace context, much of it would apply to a migration off of any collaboration tool.
First Things First: Do You Really Need to Migrate?
Workplace was in many ways cutting edge at the time of its launch in 2015, but the intervening nine years have given competitors time to catch up. The result is many companies, particularly following the pandemic-induced buying frenzy, now likely have tools within their tech stacks offering comparable — and competing — functionality.
Early adopters jumped into Workplace in many cases because employees asked for it, said Rachel Happe, founder of Engaged Organizations. And while she’s quick to add there is nothing wrong with that, it typically left companies with a tool that was unmoored from business strategy.
“It's a great opportunity to back up and do a collaborative strategy. And one of the biggest reasons is every communications or collaboration channel has a network effect, and if you don't evaluate how each is used and how they fit together, you are just adding a lot of noise and repetition,” Happe said.
The collaboration strategy shouldn’t be Workplace-specific or migration-platform-of-your-choice-specific, Happe said. It’s a big-picture audit of how people want to work together, what tools in the current tech stack help them collaborate, what tools are lying dormant and if another tool would improve the current situation.
“If managers and companies aren't talking about how they work, collaboration tools end up being a hot mess,” said Happe.
Carrie Basham Marshall notes another factor that has changed in the years since Workplace’s introduction: demographics. Younger employees now entering the workforce didn’t grow up on Facebook or MySpace, she said, so operating in this way isn’t the norm for them.
She urges companies to take a long hard look at the health of their Workplace instance. “Before they actually make the move to migrate from A to B, they need to figure out if they actually have anything worth migrating,” she said.
Just because people are on the platform, doesn’t mean it’s worth migrating, she continued. The question to ask is: “Is it worth your organization's time and money to try something new?”
She also suggests asking who your Workplace installation is serving. Marshall notes that for many of her clients, the tool was used specifically for frontline workers. If that’s the case, it means you likely will be looking for a solution specific to frontline workers, even if your company has an office-based contingent as well. “It’s not bad to have two different solutions.”
The level of activity on the platform is another area to audit. “If you are migrating with the hopes that the new technology will magically fix your engagement problems, don't do it. Resolve those problems first, and then migrate,” said Carrie Melissa Jones, founder and chief strategist of The CMJ Group.
Related Article: Meta Shutters Workplace. Now What?
What Do You Actually Move?
Once the decision is made to migrate to a new platform, the next question is what to move.
Companies can take two approaches here, Jones suggests. She recommends using a technical liaison to migrate everything en masse from Workplace to the new platform — but only after a content audit to identify the useful and relevant content to move. If that isn’t an option, Jones suggests viewing migration as an opportunity to start fresh.
“Take the top conversations from the previous platform and seed them as new conversations in the new space over the first few months. This will give you an excellent starting point for engagement,” she said.
Happe estimates 90% of Workplace environments have duplicative communities in their platform due to lack of governance. Conducting an ecosystem audit makes sense then, to combine or eliminate the duplicate and inactive communities. An alternative she mentions is to send out a survey to anyone who belongs to the platform asking them, “Please check off all the groups you still want to be part of.”
Once you’ve narrowed down which groups to migrate, Happe still recommends paring down the content. She draws a distinction between transient information and persistent information. The former merely adds noise to a platform and makes it that much harder to locate information, so she advises archiving it as required by your industry.
Before diving into content audits and community health, Marshall recommends asking the question: are we migrating communities or are we migrating content? If it’s the latter, if your Workplace instance was just a place for people to post tacit information and documents, she suggests you may just want to move that into a searchable library or corporate wiki.
If Workplace was a forum for discussion and interactivity, Marshall shared four criteria to use when deciding which communities to migrate:
- Activity — Only migrate communities or channels over that have been active in a set amount of time (e.g. within three, six, n months).
- Interactivity — As well as recent threads of conversations, look for proof that people are commenting on and discussing ideas in channels.
- Time — How long has this channel/community been active? If it’s been around for five or more years, it clearly has staying power and is a good candidate for migration.
- Size of Membership — If only three people are posting, that can be a team chat. While there’s no hard and fast rule here, look for at least 25 or more people actively engaging with a channel.
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“The vast majority of communities don't meet these criteria. It’s going to save a lot of time and energy to choose to migrate comments, content interactions only if the community is robust,” Marshall said.
Community managers or individual group leaders should also be tapped as the arbiters of what has value or not, she added. The exercise is as simple as seeing who steps up to get involved in the migration process and who doesn’t — giving a clear indication of whether that group has value or not.
Related Article: Farewell, Workplace. What Exactly Went Wrong?
How Do We Move the Data From Point A to Point B?
“The technical piece can always be dicey, because the data model is always really different,” said Happe. “So if you have a really complex ecosystem, meaning hundreds of groups, 1000s of people, and you don't have a clear data mapping model, that can get messy.”
The choice of the migration partner is critical here, said Marshall. She urges people shopping around to make sure the new vendor who will be receiving the data can live up to the promise of migrating the community with data integrity.
“That is probably the biggest hiccup, is data integrity and making sure that these people actually feel like their persona is preserved,” she said.
Here she suggests asking about how different scenarios would work, such as what you would do with conversations involving a former employee who shared valuable content, or who started an important thread or made a helpful comment. Does the content get moved over with an anonymous name, such as ‘deactivated user 123’?
”If you remove that data from a person who no longer works there, the context for the entire conversation is gone,” she cautioned.
The failure to successfully preserve these personas and conversations on the new platform can tank the new system from the get-go. But Marshall sees another option here that businesses can take: asking employees to port their own content.
“If [an employee] has a really particularly important conversation or set of documents, put it upon them to put it themselves in the new community. And again, that's another way of seeing who has skin in the game here, because migrating with a tool, migrating at scale, comes with a lot more challenges than having people do it on their own,” she said.
Related Article: Minimizing the Fallout When a Vendor Sunsets Your Digital Workplace Product
Onboarding Employees to the New Platform
All three recommend handling onboarding in a rolling fashion to ensure everything’s mapping correctly, people can find things where they expect to and to work out any kinks before introducing more people.
Jones suggests to start onboarding with advocates and highly engaged members. “Rely on them to get the word out alongside you and to advocate across the organization, so that the new platform takes off faster than the previous one,” she said.
You can expect a decline in membership upon launch, she said. However, it’s possible to turn the decline around in the first few months with a consistent rollout strategy and communications.
“After that, it's likely to decrease sharply unless you have planned specific campaigns in the months following the initial excitement. That's when the real work begins! Your goal should be to keep engagement high, over 20% of total registered users, over time,” Jones said.
Onboarding onto the new platform is an opportunity to re energize people and encourage them to rethink how they want to use the new space, said Happe.
“The biggest thing I think is missing in most change management around technology is IT leaders will get their VIPs involved, but they'll do that at the tail end,” said Happe. She suggests involving these advocates throughout the migration process, treating them as partners and sounding boards to critical decisions around community consolidation, content migration and roll out plans.
She also suggests formally recognizing these all too often volunteer and unpaid roles. “Make it part of their job.” Involving these stakeholders earlier in the process ensures they have a clear understanding of the business value and can therefore explain much of the strategy to employees during onboarding.
On the business side, she suggests leaders benchmark and baseline their metrics with the expectation that they will have to change their metrics because they will map differently in the new system. While it won’t be an exact match, she advises just getting as close as you can to the old metrics so you understand how people are responding.
Related Podcast: What It Takes to Build a Collaborative Organization
Final Advice for Workplace Customers
Although the people leading the migration clearly have their work cut out for them, their efforts will pay off in the long-term.
“This is a great opportunity to apply everything you have learned from the previous iteration of your community and to make your new one even more impactful,” said Jones.
Marshall also sees the opportunity in starting fresh, particularly for organizations that launched Workplace a long time ago without great use cases.
“Starting over with just a few key use cases and really paring down why the organization is going to use this new platform could give them an opportunity to focus in on where they want dialog and communication at scale in the organization,” she said.
