Facebook Workplace gets traction among big Australian corporate users

Facebook says 28 of the ASX’s 100 biggest companies are now using its Workplace corporate social platform.

Facebook Workplace vice president Julien Codorniou. Picture: David Swan.

Facebook’s workplace platform has hit a new milestone, reaching 3 million paid monthly active users, as the tech giant aims to build trust — and lucrative software deals — with Australia’s biggest banks and institutions.

Speaking exclusively to The Australian at Facebook’s ‘Flow’ conference in Menlo Park California, Facebook Workplace VP Julien Codorniou said 28 of Australia’s ASX 100 were now using his platform after less than three years in the market.

He wants to sign up many more.

He said three years ago Facebook signed up Australia’s NBN Co to its platform, but now had a long list of local blue chip clients including NAB, Macquarie Bank, Bunnings and New Zealand’s biggest retail group, The Warehouse Group.

“It’s really resonating in Australia,” Mr Codorniou said. “Australian CEOs have the ambition to connect everyone up in their company and give them a voice.”

Workplace was originally only supposed to be for Facebook employees, Mr Codorniou said. It was designed so that they wouldn’t have to resort to emails or a traditional intranet system.

“Companies started coming to us saying they knew we had this product internally, and they asked if they could start using it too,” he said. “We knew, based on feedback, that a lot of people use Facebook or WhatsApp for work already, and they needed something like that which was easy to use, mobile friendly, but also connected to the organisational software like Office 365 or Atlassian’s products.

“If you take the CEO of Bunnings [Mike Schneider], he was doing five or six field visits a day and he can do that on Workplace now.”

Workplace connects employees with Facebook features like chat, video calling, posts and groups, and allows a CEO for example to have interactions with workers on the front line.

Facebook has faced very public issues with trust and privacy for its consumer platform, and Mr Codorniou said Workplace had been built from scratch to ensure it wouldn’t face the same criticism.

“We had to build our credibility with this one customer at a time,” Mr Codorniou said. “We also went through the privacy and security certifications, and ISO certification, because you have to if you want to serve regulated industries like banks and energy companies.

“We have to prove to them that we could serve them. We had to build it from scratch because Facebook was not known for it.”

Workplace productivity software is a crowded market, with the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack and to a degree Dropbox all fighting for market share.

Mr Codorniou said Facebook was chasing a much broader audience than those rivals.

“We know the market of knowledge employees is about 700 million people, and we want to go after them, but also the 2.5 billion people who have never had a desk or a work email or PC,” he said. “No one else is connecting those front line workers like we are, and with us they need zero training because they already use Facebook and WhatsApp every day.”

Daragh McGrath is the CEO of Enablo, a Brisbane-based company that implements Facebook Workplace across Australia and the US.

“There’s a perception about Facebook, and when something happens it ends up on the front pages,” he told The Australian. “What we found is we closed two very significant deals a couple of weeks after the Cambridge Analytica story broke. That’s the strength of this platform, it’s really separate to the consumer stuff and it’s watertight.

“We’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in Australia and helped them get Workplace across the line. It’s been huge for them.”

Taronga Zoo's director of people, culture and learning Bettina Sammut said the platform meant the zoo now had a tool which could help new starters put names to faces, access a live organisational chart and give easy ways to contact staff members, whether they were in grounds, off-site or in the field.

"From an organisation’s perspective, it was easy to roll-out as most of our employees knew how to use the platform, so we didn’t have to run additional training courses to teach our people how to use it, they picked it up quite quickly," she said.

"We’d like to see a bit more integration with other systems, such as Outlook, but we are working with our IT team to look at ways to roll this out.

"Workplace now acts as a 'leveller'. It allows anyone in the organisation to communicate in a similar way with a similar level of access."

The company also announced a Workplace app for Facebook’s video and camera system Portal, as well as live captioning features for workplace videos and auto-translating starting with 14 languages.

David Swan travelled to Menlo Park as a guest of Facebook.