Workplace by Facebook Launch Strategy

Strategy and Approach

1. Top down - bottom up feedback
Organisations communicate top down to broadcast messages to employees and providing a feedback loop helps ensure opinions and ideas from everyone feed into how the organisation is run. This type of communication is an important way to align leadership and employees as well as notify employees of important changes. You can start creating these announcement and social groups by moving company-wide email communications to an FYI Group.

Examples of these groups include 'All Employee FYI', 'London Announcements', 'UK Social'

2. Team communication
This is where the day to day work gets done. Think about each team in your organisation and create a group for that team with the manager as an admin. Also have each of your champions create groups to reflect projects they are leading. Next time someone goes to send a lengthy 'mass email' put it into the team or project group on Workplace and collaborate much more efficiently.

Examples of these groups include 'Marketing Team', 'Western Region HR Team', 'Website Relaunch Project'

3. Cross functional collaboration
One of the more challenging communication flows for organisations is the ability to collaborate across regions, languages and teams. However, with Workplace, the ability to develop a collective knowledge base is made easier, with open discussion or team groups, helping to bring the whole organisation together.

Examples of these groups include 'Bright Ideas', 'Customer Experience Ideas', 'IT Helpdesk'. Also think about having a feedback group for each team so everyone knows exactly how to reach out to them. Some examples include 'Marketing Feedback', 'IT Feedback'

4. Working with people outside your company
Workplace is not only for your internal employees to connect and collaborate. You can also use Workplace Mutli-Company Groups with people you work with outside your organisation so you can bring the conversation onto Workplace. You can manage projects just as you would internally but have the ability to do so with external members.

Pro Tip: Adding 'MCG' to the name of Multi-Company Groups will highlight to your internal team members that this is a group with people outside your organisation.

Tactical How-to

When creating your groups make sure you think about:

Privacy settings
Who is the intended audience for the group and how useful is it to people in the organisation?

• Open - Anyone can find the group using search and see the content (Note: content from open groups can appear on anyones newsfeed)
• Closed - Anyone can find the group and see its description using Workplace search but only members can see the content
• Secret - Only members of the group can find the group and see the content

Posting permissions (accessible from group settings)
Who do you want to be able to post in the group? Think about the importance of the posts (e.g. you might only want select people to post in an all company group)

• Anyone - Everyone sees the Post composer box and their post automatically goes into the group
• Admins only - Only admins can post to the group. Others won't see the composer box
• Posting Approval - Everyone sees the composer box and can submit posts however they will only be visible in the group if approved by an Admin/Moderator

Group membership
There are several ways to control membership to groups

• Individual invite - Invite colleagues one by one (good for small team groups)
• Bulk invite - Invite people using a list of email addresses (perfect for large groups 25+)
• Default group - For groups useful to everyone in the organisation (as an admin, you can make them a default group from your admin dashboard)