Why the Expectation of Openness is Changing in the Workplace

by Harriet Muir
Published on May 21, 2019

Watching the below video which the Workplace team released today caused me to stop and reflect on a conversation I had with an executive at a bank recently. The general topic of the conversation was, why should we spend money on Workplace when we already have lots of collaboration tools such as email and intranet in use today.

It took me a moment to think about how to respond, and as I was reflecting on the question, I looked around the amazing office space that I was sitting in. My response went something along the lines of

Look at this amazing space that we’re sitting in. Your office is awesome! Your facilities team have clearly spent a lot of time researching this space, and a considerable amount of money fitting it out. I would imagine that there were a few objectives in mind when plans for the office was put together. This was likely done to provide employees with a space that they feel excited to come into every morning. In addition, the way the space has been designed, with activity-based working and no assigned desks is done to facilitate open working, collaboration and ‘bumping in’ – all of which helps foster getting work done in a modern and efficient way. But then, you ask your team to use legacy platforms, such as an intranet with relatively static content, you burden them with email overload, you ask them to use video or instant messaging platforms that cause them lots of lost time and you don’t have authoring tools that facilitate collaboration.

The irony of the massive amounts of money that are spent on office space, and the opposite experience that their ‘collaboration’ tools provided was not lost. Suddenly, the thought of the familiarity and ease of use of a collaboration platform built on Facebook – the platform that we use to collaborate and share with our friends and family on a daily basis and the fact that it costs less than a cup of coffee per employee, per month started to make a massive amount of sense to this executive.

I suggest you keep this story in mind as you take the two minutes to review Facebook’s video about how the expectation of openness is changing the workplace. I would then welcome the opportunity to speak with you about how Enablo and Workplace can help transform the way that you get work done in your organization.

Meet the Author
Harriet Muir
Harriet discovered the power of Workplace when she rolled it out at a large energy company while in their internal comms team. Now she gets to bring together her love of collaboration tech and internal culture with her experience in marketing and storytelling as Enablo's Marketing Manager.

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