Published on the 17/10/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

With Facebook’s ‘Workplace’ entering the fray for social media at work, Deloitte NZ partner and digital specialist Grant Frear shares his perspectives…

“The first thing which is important to note is that this is not a market that Facebook is making, but rather one that it is going into and intends to dominate. The business case has largely been proved and validated by, for example, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer; without doubt, though, increasingly social technology is further changing the workplace.”

Workplace launched recently and marks the official entry of the undisputed heavyweight champion of consumer social networking into the commercial world.

Frear pointed out that the key question, irrespective of platform, is how organisations can realise the potential benefits of social networks for business and avoid the pitfalls; the addictiveness of social networks is a clue to both. “The benefits come from the levels of connectivity, the efficiency of information flow and the ability to make connections. The pitfalls, of course, we probably know from our personal lives, where we reflect that we have perhaps wasted a lot of life’s most precious resource, time, without having much to show for it.”

Frear said this compels thinking about the how and why of collaboration – how much are you doing it and to what end. “That is the real challenge, to find the particular scenario within business to drive value for all participants from things like Workplace. And the business has to ask, how does that additional collaboration manifest in  better business results, outcomes and delivery to customers? Or, is it collaboration for collaboration’s sake and a sinkhole for time as social networks have become in personal life. Balancing it out is where the discussion needs to happen.”

There are essentially two ways to approach corporate social media, Frear said. Organically, which has worked pretty well for the social networks on the consumer space, or directed. Anecdotally, he said Deloitte itself has used Yammer for some 4 or 5 years and has tried a number of models – organic, community-based, and directed. “What we’ve seen is natural ebbs and flows; it starts out as a bright, shiny new thing with a bit of a halo effect, but soon the old practices seep back in. People realose they aren’t getting value from it and withdraw a bit, then you have to drive it and reinforce the use of extended collaboration.”

With the rise of social networks at the office, Frear added that there was a distinct possibility of ‘first wave’ technologies being abandoned and the information contained in them becoming stranded. Intranets – remember those? – are front and centre. “When people become conditioned to looking for company information, like policies, in social media rather than where it actually exists on the intranet, you could end up with an inefficient and noncompliant organisation as people might no longer bother to check the codified and captured information,” he said.

One answer is to employ more people to facilitate that sort of access to information, and that in turn leads to bots and AI as another answer, instead of a person.

As for the possibility of a parallel, unstructured set of user-generated information arising, Frear said this wasn’t of any particular concern. “The first computer systems really just approached information storage from a filing cabinet perspective, so the data had to be orderly, structured and logical. Now, with machine learning and AI, unstructured databases don’t need to be constrained with filing cabinet thinking. The technology has progressed.”

One final risk that Frear sees with Workplace specifically (and which may explain why Facebook left its world-leading brand out of the business product) is the potential for inadvertent sharing of information intended for a personal social network. “We’re not going to have to wait too long for that to happen,” he confidently predicted.

However, given that Facebook is a ‘paradigm that people understand and get value from, which is simple and easy and everyone knows how to use it,’ Frear said “Why not leverage it. If it is ring fenced and secure, it is a strong proposition.”