News Analysis
With little fanfare, Meta announced it was shuttering its enterprise collaboration tool, Workplace (aka Facebook at Work). The news, first reported in TechCrunch, means customers can use the platform per usual until Aug. 31, 2025. It will then move to “read only” rights until May 2026, at which point it will be shut down. Customers who remain on the platform after Sept. 1, 2024 will receive a 50% discount on their bill.
The questions now are what went wrong and what comes next?
What Went Wrong?
Workplace launched to much fanfare (and some skepticism) in October 2016. At the time, Facebook was one of the biggest names in personal social networking and this familiarity, combined with the promise of easy adoption, translated to early customer wins including Royal Bank of Scotland, Starbucks, Walmart and Delta Airlines. “The early hype made it seem plausible to the market that they were going to be wildly successful,” digital workplace advisor Carrie Basham Marshall told Reworked.
However, the early success never translated into long-term momentum. Although the company gained fans (and superfans) among customers for its ease of use, swift adoption rates and facilitation in creating vibrant communities, people also complained of getting lost in the flood of user-generated content, poor video conferencing capabilities and the lack of strong administrator controls.
More to the point, Meta never fully understood the wider enterprise world, ClearBox Consulting founder Sam Marshall (no relation) told Reworked. It presented Workplace as a solution for all digital workplace needs and failed to acknowledge the complexities of collaborative work, including the importance of documents in completing day-to-day work.
As a result, he said, “Facebook never offered the kind of customer success management services that were necessary for in-depth uptake of a new way of working like social communities.”
Basham Marshall also noted a level of naivete in Meta’s attitudes around the enterprise — in part, its assumption that social networking between personal connections is the same dynamic as the social contract between employer and employee. “Facebook misunderstood how software adoption works in the enterprise,” she said. “[It] hoped that it could sell a carbon copy of its core product into the enterprise and mirror the success from the consumer world.”
However, when it became clear this wasn’t possible, the company added features to meet enterprise needs “that got away from their core code base and feature set, making Workplace an entirely bespoke product,” she continued.
It also never fully addressed concerns around security and failed to integrate with the broader digital workplace until it was too late.
“Meta never really acknowledged the uphill battle they had with building trust around things such as data security. Indeed, confidence in [its] understanding of privacy and data protection eroded over the period after the launch of Workplace,” Marshall said.
The lack of integration with established enterprise systems was another key factor in its failure to gain further traction, he continued: “In particular, they only reluctantly acknowledged the dominance of Microsoft and Microsoft 365 in the enterprise world.”
Indeed, even the former VP of Workplace, Julien Codorniou acknowledged its handicap in the enterprise world in a post on LinkedIn: “You can't do enterprise SaaS as a side gig.”
The company slowed the introduction of new tools and features in recent years, all but falling silent on the Workplace front for the last 12 or so months.
Related Article: The Myth of the Digital Workplace Hub
The Way We Work Has Changed
The seven and a half years since Workplace launched may as well have been a century in terms of changes to how we work.
Workplace’s launch caught the tail end of years of technology development and advocacy for a new approach to work called at times social business, enterprise 2.0 and later, the digital workplace. The movement, spurred on from the very social tools that Facebook and Twitter launched, envisioned a more collaborative approach to work, that flipped top-down communications on its head and ended internal email use once and for all.
The number and breadth of solutions expanded in the ensuing years, layering on yet more complexities and doorways between an employee and the tasks they sought to accomplish. The pandemic introduced a whole new cohort to new styles of working and tools, all introduced under duress. The number of tools in use in the workplace continued to grow. And Gen Z entered the workplace, bringing with them different technology expectations and social habits to their jobs.
“If you look at the next generation of our workforce, young folks operate with a completely different set of social paradigms. At the same time, email still rules communications at school and for other formal conversations. I don't have the answer; it's something I think about a lot. But if Facebook is sunsetting its corporate social tool, I'm not sure who has the answer,” said Basham Marshall.
Distilling the technological and societal changes of the last eight years in four paragraphs is ridiculous, but suffice it to say: today is a much different time than Oct. 10, 2016.
“Where we are now is that enterprises are looking for digital employee experience (DEX) solutions which are much more integrated across the board. Organizations aren’t really interested in standalone islands of communication between employees,” Marshall said.
Related Article: The End of the Social Collaboration Experiment: The Technology Is the Problem
Don’t Forget the Metaverse
Another factor feeding into this week's news: CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big bet on the metaverse. Although it had briefly appeared as if the company was eschewing the metaverse in favor of AI, earlier this month the announcement that it was opening up its VR operating system for third parties showed that wasn’t the case.
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The company moved Workplace under the newly formed Reality Labs’ Meta for Work Division in 2022. Reality Labs is the company’s big bet on the metaverse that has consistently bled money; specifically, more than $45 billion as of late April, according to CNBC.
Further hurting Workplace was the “year of efficiency” Zuckerberg announced in February 2023. It resulted in part in a series of substantial layoffs to cut back headcount following a pandemic-driven hiring spree, with 11,000 losing their jobs in November 2022 and another 10,000 in March of 2023. Although a company spokesperson responded to a direct question about the impact on Workplace in May 2023, “On this, we can’t comment on specifics,” speculation started circulating around the long-term viability of the platform.
A company source shared the following confirmation of the metaverse’s role in the decision with TechCrunch: "We are discontinuing Workplace from Meta so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work."
Related Article: Microsoft Is Retiring Viva Topics. Here's What You Can Do
What Comes Next for Workplace Customers?
The companies on Workplace have a timeline and options when it comes to moving their data off the platform. Having said that, it's never easy to take on a migration from one platform to another and undo years of work and investment — not just of money but time, effort and energy — into a platform you ultimately cannot control the fate of. Added to this is the purpose the platform served: there’s an emotional component involved in having to move what may be a thriving community that doesn’t really enter the picture for say, an e-signature platform.
The company named Zoom’s Workvivo as its “preferred migration partner.” In a LinkedIn post, intranet and comms consultant Suzie Robinson noted the two shared some “crossover of functionality and experience” but that companies should explore all of their options before jumping into a new platform, a sentiment Marshall echoed.
“It's a really good time to step back and consider your digital workplace landscape. There are a lot of other products that combine the intranet side and employee frontline side with good communities,” he said.
Basham Marshall’s first advice is to take a deep breath. “Start considering two key questions: what content do we want or need to keep from our current Workplace community, and how do we want to proceed with enterprise collaboration?” She suggests conducting a full audit before purging unnecessary data and selectively moving data over to a new tool if looking to replicate the community on another platform. However, she echoes Marshall in his advice to take a step back.
“You’re at a fork in the road, and maybe the route toward a new community isn’t where you want to head …. If you’re truly invested in engaging your employees, spend the rest of the year doing discovery interviews, learning what works and what doesn't, what your employees want and need, and determine the company's appetite for ‘social’ or ‘collaboration’ once again.”
If and when you move to the new platform, Basham Marshall adds one final entreaty: “Please invest in solid change management.”
As a final post script: Workplace will apparently live on, albeit only for those who work at Meta.
