Editorial
Facebook was riding high with consumers when, in 2015, it announced its entry to the enterprise market with Facebook at Work.
But nine years on — and several name changes later — it announced its imminent closure, with customers warned it’ll be switched to read-only in August 2025, before being shuttered altogether a year later.
So how did the social media giant get it wrong in the enterprise? And where do customers go next?
Misaligned Design Philosophy
Despite its dominance in the B2C market, Facebook — now known as Meta — struggled to adapt its offering to the unique demands of business environments, leading to some significant shortcomings.
Facebook crafted Workplace based on its own operational and cultural model — a model far removed from the conventional workflows of most companies, including those in the tech sector.
It’s something we see a lot; startups which have grown with social tools at their heart as they scale operate very differently from those that try to retrofit them into existing operating models, where adopting tools means changing long-established behaviors and processes.
This fundamental mismatch meant that the platform did not resonate with the operational and communications needs of potential buyers in the corporate and tech sectors, where they struggled to gain a foothold.
Related Article: Investors Backed Away From the Metaverse in 2023. But It's Not Goodbye Yet
Overemphasis on Openness
Workplace assumed a level of transparency that simply wasn't practical for most companies. Sensitive information was often too accessible, leading to potential security and privacy concerns. In the early days, clients raised this, only to be told it was their own lack of transparency that was the problem, not the tools. While that might be philosophically true, it’s not an answer that shifts minds. IT buys for how things are, not how they ought to be.
This issue came to the forefront during the Facebook Whistleblower scandal, where damaging internal information was easily found on Workplace, including details that raised significant ethical and social concerns.
Misunderstanding Corporate Business Culture
Facebook underestimated the importance of documents and content over conversations in office settings. In most corporate cultures, you haven’t done a day’s work unless you have locked it in, in the form of a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
I’d agree this is illogical. In a world where all our work is digital, it really doesn’t make sense that to share an idea with a team, you have to commit it to PowerPoint, a format designed to be presented live on a screen to a group of people but which is invariably read by individuals on a laptop screen.
But while it’s illogical, the addiction to documents is a fact of office life. We could, and probably should, share things using conversations and non-linear formats. But we don’t, as the miniscule number of Microsoft Sway users know all too well.
It took several years before the platform recognized the need for CMS-style functionality to serve as a reliable source of company content, crucial for maintaining up-to-date, accurate and trusted information.
Not in With the IT Crowd
Workplace struggled to gain favor with IT teams, the critical decision-makers in adopting new enterprise social tools. The platform initially allowed employees to create shadow intranet solutions for free, bypassing IT and creating headaches for those departments when integrating or dismantling these unsanctioned networks.
This “get them hooked then make them pay'' model — (similar to the early days of Yammer) — meets short-term adoption targets while wrecking irreparable damage to the product’s reputation with IT.
Blurring Personal and Professional Lines
For Meta, the familiarity of the interface was the point. People already knew how it worked.
But this is a double-edged sword. There’s discomfort among some employees in using a platform that felt too similar to their personal Facebook accounts. This overlap made it difficult for users to separate their professional and personal digital personas, which is essential for maintaining professionalism and privacy in the workplace.
Enterprises Aren’t Feeling Social Anymore
The inherent design of Workplace, focused on fostering open conversation and sharing, led to unintended consequences where employees sometimes shared thoughts that were not suitable for professional environments, dubbed by one client as "corporate suicide."
A string of scandals and a growing tide of toxicity have changed the way we use public social media. We’re posting less in public and sharing more privately, in groups, or via tools like WhatsApp.
Changing behaviors on social media have led to enterprise social networks falling out of favor. It’s notable how many of the companies which pioneered them have switched to more curated digital workplace experiences. These serve high-quality, tailored, professionally-produced content rather than hoping that a large volume of user-generated content would see quality messaging rise to the top of the feed.
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Strategic Pivots
Despite these setbacks, Facebook made a strategic pivot by targeting non-desk-based workers, like those at Walmart, achieving higher adoption rates due to the platform's ease of use and familiar interface.
Additionally, offering easy integrations with key HR and transactional tools proved to be a wise move, aligning more closely with the actual needs of employees when using enterprise applications.
Facebook/Meta built relationships with partners offering services in enablement, onboarding and developing custom tools like bots. This meant they could scale Workplace to enterprise customers without the account management heavy lifting.
Many of these partners leaned heavily into Workplace, some exclusively so, and will be heavily impacted by its closure.
Similarly, Meta’s Workplace For Good initiative promised the platform for free to nonprofits. Unsurprisingly, this gave them huge inroads into the sector.
We helped the United Kingdom’s largest children’s charity, Barnardo’s, select and implement Workplace. It offered an effectively and powerful way to connect staff and volunteers with each other, and with their mission. Thanks to its usability and familiarity it quickly gained traction with their volunteers, many with low digital confidence, and it transformed the organization’s communications and engagement.
Charities like Barnardo’s will be particularly hard-hit by Workplace’s closure, and least able to afford alternatives.
Looking Ahead
As Meta transitions away from Workplace, it has selected just one partner to offer a simple migration: Zoom-owned Workvivo.
But switching platforms presents an opportunity to take stock. The digital workplace market has been transformed in the past decade, and is evolving rapidly every year.
Workplace customers would be well advised to take a look at their user and organizational needs, and conduct a vendor-agnostic review to find the right fit for your organization’s specific needs and technological architecture. There are plenty of consultants and agencies who can help.
Related Article: Why You Should Have a Plan B for Your Digital Workplace Tools
Lessons Learned
As news of Workplace’s demise became public, many former customers and staffers took to LinkedIn to express sadness at the product’s failure to revolutionize the way we collaborate and communicate at work.
But perhaps it was the expectation that it ever would do so that sowed the seeds of its failure. Our use of technology both shapes and is shaped by culture and behavior. While Facebook’s pioneering social network transformed the way we connected with one another, it did that by growing organically and adapted in response to how it was used.
Workplace turned up, more or less fully formed, announcing “this is how we do it at Facebook, and we’re brilliant,” with a mission to make people work like the tech does, and not make tech work for how people work. Expecting customers to pivot to Meta’s way of working isn’t feasible for a “normal” office like Dunder Mifflin or Wernham Hogg.
Facebook's attempt and ultimate failure to move the needle in the enterprise sector highlights the stickiness of working culture, and the critical importance of aligning technological solutions with operational and cultural realities.
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