A recent study of 4,000 senior business decision-makers and frontline workers in the UK and the US revealed that only 3% of employees feel connected to the C-suite. In today’s golden era of social media, employees expect greater involvement and transparency from the people at the top of the food chain. They want to feel that they know their business leaders.
Despite this change in expectations, senior leaders remain the most time-poor people in a company. There’s nothing that can be done to change that, but what leaders do have the power to change is the tools they use to get work done. 95% of business leaders recognise the value of adopting collaboration tools at work. With over 3 million customers and counting, including the likes of Walmart, Delta and Starbucks, here’s why business leaders the world over are turning to Workplace from Meta to work better with their teams.
Instant Communication For Immediate Impact
Workplace Chat gives leaders an immediacy of communication that is critical for their role. Rather than having to sort through a never-ending inbox of emails to respond on a project, leaders can send a message on Workplace Chat for immediate impact. Whether it’s shooting through a list of action points following a meeting, or sharing feedback with a colleague in real-time, Workplace Chat allows managers to be agile and efficient.
And if sending messages via chat isn’t quite getting the message across, you can simply switch to a call directly from the Workplace Chat conversation.
Work Everywhere, On Any Time Zone
Workplace’s auto-translate feature takes the guesswork out of managing global teams. Any Workplace post written in a different language will automatically appear with an option to translate the message, meaning that no good idea gets lost in translation.
For business leaders, this allows their message to truly go global. It also allows them to start a dialogue with international colleagues that they otherwise would not have been able to communicate with. For Lionel Chenet, Digital Communications Director of Europe’s leading precast concrete solutions company, Consoles, Workplace’s auto-translate feature has totally transformed the way teamwork happens. Before Workplace, there was very limited communication amongst Consoles’ global workforce of 11,000 employees who speak different languages. Now, Workplace’s auto-translate feature allows Lionel and his employees to collaborate in 25 different languages.
An Alternative To Face-To-Face Meetings
Meetings are a massive time-drain for every business leader. A Harvard Business Review study conducted last year revealed that 72% of a CEO’s time at work is spent in meetings. Of those meetings, 38% last longer than an hour.
Workplace’s Video Chat tool allows people to be present in meetings, without physically having to go between different meeting locations, or even sit in a meeting room. Video Chat can host up to 50 people dialling in to a call from the desktop or mobile. As such, it’s a great way for team leaders to make remote staff feel included in regular team catch-ups. Replacing in-person meetings with video calls, where possible, is a great way to keep the meeting agenda concise and eliminate the loss of time spent travelling to and from the meeting itself.
Smarter Top-Down Communication
Live Video offers leaders an efficient alternative to the regular one-size-fits-all company meetings. Rather than rallying staff together from different offices and time zones for a meeting, managers and CEOs can broadcast a live video message to all staff via Workplace instead. Staff can watch the video on Workplace from their phone at the airport or from the laptop at a remote office location, making Live Video a more effective – and egalitarian – way of communication company-wide news to staff at the same time. What’s more, employees can contribute real-time feedback by commenting and reacting to the video as it’s being broadcast. This gives business leaders unprecedented access to authentic thoughts and reactions from employees, and in turn, makes employees feel more engaged with the company agenda.
Employee Recognition
It’s easy to overlook the power that company leaders have to influence their employees. In the US, it’s estimated that managers account for around 70% of the variance in employee engagement at work. Knowing how responsive employees are to positive feedback, simply acknowledging an idea from a staff member, or congratulating an employee on reaching a work milestone, goes a long way. And Workplace’s News Feed is the perfect place to do just that.
The News Feed is a company’s central hub of information. Using advanced AI, the News Feed gathers information and updates on projects that are most relevant to each employee. Dispersed amongst that are the latest updates from people and teams all over the business. The News Feed gives leadership teams a unique insight into what’s happening on the ground with employees on the frontline, and gives them the chance to connect and engage with staff that they don’t have the ability to talk to in person. In doing so, business leaders can build a virtual presence on Workplace that makes employees feel closer to them.
Whether it’s condensing multiple face-to-face weekly meetings into one video call, or praising a new idea from a frontline staff member, Workplace breaks down hierarchies and allows business leaders to work better with their people and teams.
