Increasing the frequency and quality of collaboration at work is shown to improve performance, and the evidence is piling up. Whether it is Gallup data showing the benefits of close friendships at work or the Wharton Business School showing the importance of executive communication skills or McKinsey demonstrating a quantifiable relationship between collaboration and performance

Put this all together, and it is easy to believe that a key ingredient in a company’s competitiveness is to do whatever it takes to increase collaboration across the board.

Easier said than done.

Increasing collaboration requires a broad approach, driven by leadership, involving increasing opportunities to socialize at work, reduce friction in communications across organizations, and enable people to collaborate better around their work.

This is where Workplace by Facebook comes in.

Workplace by Facebook addresses these issues by enhancing the three layers of work that already exist in organizations: the social layer, the communication layer, and the productivity layer.

This post explores each layer.

Social layer

The first layer of work on Workplace is the social layer. I am not talking about social media. In fact, despite people’s need to lump Workplace with Facebook and call it a social media tool for work or an enterprise social network misses the point.

Workplace is really a communications platform, as we will discuss in the next section.

So, when I talk about the social layer of work on Workplace, I am talking about the social interactions people have with each other every day: developing relationships, making friends, and having conversations. I am also talking about camaraderie, which is critical to a high-performing company. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, camaraderie is more than about having fun, it is about “creating a common sense purpose and a mentality that we are in-it together.”

This social layer exists in organizations whether there is a tool like Workplace or not. In fact, some companies design the workplace specifically to encourage socializing. Steve Jobs designed offices like Pixar and Apple’s new “spaceship” office with central, atrium formats to draw people to the center. Jobs “wanted the office layout to encourage unplanned meetings.” People bumping into each other on the way to the bathroom or to another part of the office.

This is what Workplace does for global, distributed companies. It creates an environment in which global and distributed colleagues can bump into each other and socialize more frequently.

Communications layer

The most effective leaders make it a priority to become a better communicator. Effective communications inspires people, aligns people around a common goal, and gives people the freedom and responsibility to make decisions that are aligned with values.

The problem is that executives are not very good at it.

For one, executives do not spend enough time on it. According to communications expert Walter Montgomery on the Knowledge@Wharton blog, “Chief executives need to focus on communications as a management capability much more seriously than they typically do.”

Another reason is that the tools executives use have not kept up with the distributed, global, fast-paced, mobile and social world in which we live. Email, for example, is a one-to-one or one-to-many tool that does not encourage conversation and does not allow for participation beyond the intended recipients. Furthermore, email is is optimized for text, which is only one of many mediums of effective communications.

Workplace changes all of this.

It allows executives to engage in conversations with people around messages. New perspectives and ideas can be easily introduced into the conversation.

Workplace also gives executives a tool for reaching the entire organization in multiple formats (text, pictures, video, and conversations) reducing the friction of delivering and reinforcing messages. In just one example, Workplace empowers a c-suite executive to broadcast live video of authentic messages that can be watched directly by everyone without the filtering of hearsay and secondhand information.

Productivity layer

Because of Facebook’s reputation as the most engaging and popular social network in the world, used by 1.5 billion people on the planet, it is not difficult to see that Workplace could be used as a communications tool and to engage people socially at work. However, the true value of any enterprise software is helping people, teams, and companies collaborate more often and more effectively to do their jobs better.

And there is evidence that increased collaboration produces quantifiable increased business results. In a McKinsey report on collaboration, an analysis of a construction company showed that job performance is correlated with time spent collaborating in teams.  

Workplace is used by companies to improve collaboration and performance. At ServiceRocket, one of the first things we did in Workplace was to create groups for project teams. As people saw actual work getting done (conversations around actual work) they began to see beyond Workplace as a messaging tool and more of a place to bring teams together around their work.

Amplifying the Impact of Collaboration

Workplace provides more and easier chances for socializing and building relationships, reduces friction in communications, and empowers people to collaborate better around their actual work. Another way to look at it is that Workplace amplifies the impact of collaboration on performance.

See Workplace in Action

If you would like to learn more about what is possible in Workplace and see the product in action, join one of our bi-weekly Jam Sessions.