Tweet This
For years,
The idea is straightforward. Most of us have noticed that we no longer email friends as much as we communicate with them via social media apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, Instagram, and Snapchat. The social media giant now wants us to use Facebook not only before and after work but also at the office during working hours. “The same way we connect people, we want to connect coworkers,” a company spokesperson has said.
It’s not unusual for technologies that started in the consumer market to subsequently cross over into the professional setting. In 2007, when iPhone first came out, Blackberry didn’t think of it as a threat. “It [the iPhone] wasn’t secure,” Blackberry COO Larry Conlee shrugged. “It had rapid battery drain and a lousy [digital] keyboard.”
Watch on Forbes:
We all know what happened next. Apple soon eclipsed Blackberry’s core market among large corporations, causing Blackberry’s valuation to plunge from $83.4 billion to $3.4 billion in less than five years.
Now, can Mark Zuckerberg follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs to revolutionize how office workers communicate, taking what was once an internal directory for Harvard undergraduates and rebranding it as a management tool for C-suite executives?
How Joyful Email Greetings Turn Into High-Pressure Chores
Those who remember the early days of consumer internet probably recall the cringe-inducing dial-up modem sound. The year was 1995, and the cost of internet access was still calculated on a by-the-minute basis, like a long distance phone call. I would log on and off dozens of times a day in anticipation of surprise greetings from a distant friend or a remote relative.
Mum dubbed me “the lab rat” as if I was some poor animal with an electrode hooked to the area of my brain associated with craving, waiting to receive stimulation. In a laboratory, such mice were shown to forgo food and water but to incessantly press a lever that administered shocks of pleasure to them until they died of exhaustion. Though I never once missed dinner, AOL’s “You've Got Mail” announcement was enough to perk me up with adrenaline-fueled excitement.
Like all other things, email communication is subject to the law of diminishing returns. A 2015 survey revealed that the average white-collar worker spent up to 6.3 hours a day on email, with a bit more than half of that time devoted to work emails. Instead of delivering jolts of pleasure to a worker, the constant avalanche of email requests and the pressure to reply instantly only elevate work-related stress, with its chronic effect manifesting a range of physical malaise, from heart disease to sleep problems, from headaches to memory impairment. The extended working time further diminishes a worker’s output per hour, as a study by Stanford University’s John Pencavel reveals.
Reinventing Communication At Work
Facebook’s Workplace is by no means the first attempt to change the way we communicate. Back when Blackberry was a novelty, few managers were armed with the pocket email device. The lucky few were able to beat their in-boxes hands down, achieving what must now be considered a near-mystical state of no unread emails. GE Capital CEO Michael Neal reportedly slept with a BlackBerry under his pillow; Wall Street bankers nicknamed it the “CrackBerry.” Before long, however, BlackBerry proliferated throughout corporate America, and with it, came the Red Queen’s race—as described in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “It takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place.”
The IT industry has since derived a myriad of solutions to fight the losing in-box battle. With artificial intelligence in full rage, Google has touted its Smart Reply function, which is capable of composing automatic responses that Gmail users can select. Whether consumers will one day delegate wedding invitations to some kind of chatbot is anyone’s guess. But it would certainly be amusing if our office surrogates kept on conversing while every human worker was out for Thanksgiving dinner.
Rather than trying to run faster, another approach is to redesign the communication platform itself. The fundamental problem with email is that it is as unstructured as a blank piece of paper and it remains, first and foremost, a text-based implement. Composing in long form is mentally taxing. Filing and searching for relevant information are time-consuming. The neverending niceties (“Thanks for reaching out!”) are too exhausting. The rise of Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat all testify to these email disadvantages.
Slack and Yammer (which Microsoft acquired in 2012) are among the early pioneers that adopted a social media approach for office environments. Each bills itself as “the enterprise social network.” They both come with private chatrooms that mash up company email, instant messaging, and corporate intranet data, capable of connecting to external systems such as Dropbox and Twitter. They offer the ability to create many streams of specialized conversation, and users can search messages by keywords and set up alerts to stay on top of ongoing dialogues.
Slack and Yammer promise to bring visibility to what people are really working on at large organizations. They enable companies to be open and participative. They help foster familiarity among colleagues who might not otherwise meet physically. And yet, despite showing great promises, neither has gone mainstream. Why?
Old Habits Die Hard
There is a common refrain among economists: Sunk costs don't matter. That is, when an amount of money or effort has been spent and can't be retrieved, it is said to be sunk or gone, like spilled milk. Rationally, one should ignore sunk costs and move on, but that is hard advice to follow.
Richard Thaler, the celebrated behavioral economist from Chicago University, illustrated this through a study that involved different levels of initiation for three groups of students waiting to join a discussion group.
Group 1 was put through a "severe" initiation: Students were required to read sexually explicit material out loud.
Group 2 was given a "mild" initiation: Students were required to read tamer material out loud.
Group 3 was the control group: Students were not subjected to the initiation.
As the sunk cost hypothesis would predict, the students who endured the most pain also exhibited the greatest commitment to the discussion group they later joined. Other researchers’ efforts had produced similar findings.
Humans are rarely entirely rational. The more we invest in the status quo, the less likely we are to change. And if we spend up to six hours a day on an existing email interface, switching to Yammer or Slack requires just too much cognitive effort, even when the existing technology is inferior to the new offering. Here lies the biggest advantage of Facebook’s Workplace: Facebook today has about 1.7 billion users.
New Wine In Old Wineskins
“Almost everyone uses Facebook outside of work. That means I don’t have to train anyone,” said Simon McNamara, Chief Administrative Officer at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Even shop assistants, restaurant waiters or truck drivers, who don't have access to traditional work tools, are familiar with the Facebook interface.
With a global workforce of more than 100,000, RBS had signed up for an early trial for a subgroup of 30,000 employees in 2015. Facebook claimed that more than 1,000 companies have been using the new service for free, including other big names like Heineken, Starbucks, Club Med, Danone, and Campbell's. They came from countries including Britain, France, India, U.S. and Norway. Companies get data on their employees’ activity at work, including how many messages they send and posts they make, although employers can’t see what employees do on their personal accounts. These twos, thankfully, remain separate.
“Some nuances are different, but there are more similarities,” noted McNamara, comparing Workplace to his personal account. Functionalities such as newsfeed and groups are well-understood by most users. “The adoption rate was a phenomenal 90%.” Still, for Facebook, getting into the enterprise may well give it the access to an arena for leveraging the all-important artificial intelligence (AI).
“Facebook’s progress in AI can be seen in everything from the company’s news feed to the way in which people are tagged,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer. “Then there is the realization that the only way to scale that is to start building intelligent systems in AI that can be my real-time assistant all the time, making sure that I do not miss anything that is critical to me and that I do not spend my time on stuff that is less important. The only way we know how to do that at the scale we operate at is artificial intelligence.”
Viewed in this light, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Facebook is rolling out its enterprise service at rock-bottom prices, charging just $3 per month per user, and down to $1 a month per user for groups of more than 10,000—less than half the price of its competitors.
It doesn’t matter that the total business chat market is tiny when compared to Facebook's ad business, with the risk of being self-cannibalized because of Workplace's ad-free environment. The global enterprise messaging app market is estimated to be worth $1.9 billion by 2019; Facebook alone is pulling $25 billion ad revenue a year. The fact is, no other playing field could be as large as the office setting that gives Facebook the goldmine of valuable data and human interaction waiting to be automated. It is the data, not quick profits, that Facebook's Workplace is generating.
If Facebook gets this right, we'll no longer close our social media tabs when our bosses walk past. We may instead open them quickly.
Howard Yu is professor of strategy and innovation at Swiss business school IMD. Stay connected on LinkedIn and Twitter (@howardhyu).
