Taking Advantage of the Workplace Sunset: Finding Opportunity Amidst Change

If you’ve Googled “replacement for Workplace” in the past week, chances are you’re from one of the 30,000+ organizations that will be on the hunt for a new solution since Meta announced that their Workplace tool will sunset by September 2025. 

So now what? With the clock ticking, your organization needs to make decisions around if and how to replace the tool. Many leaders tasked with this endeavor may be wondering what the best next steps are and how to use this time of change as an opportunity to move toward a post-Workplace world with success.

So let’s talk about Workplace–what the platform provided, and what to consider as you move forward. 

The pros and cons of Workplace

Meta’s Workplace was launched in 2016 and has been mainly used as an enterprise social platform, providing users with features like groups, instant messaging, and a news feed. Workplace brought the familiar interface of Facebook, but tailored for professional internal comms and connection.

The benefits of Workplace include an ease of use that delivered high engagement rates since the platform’s familiarity to Facebook meant using the tool didn’t require any special training. Workplace also nurtures a feeling of connection for disparate and remote teams, creates a sense of community within an organization, and helps to boost morale across colleagues and teams. 

But the Workplace use case simply wasn’t strong enough to drive real business value because, while adoption and engagement of the tool may be high, the conversations happening within the tool aren’t typically work-centered. Because the tool is social in nature, there is a tendency for conversations to be more informal and not centered around revenue-driving work. 

Further, Workplace doesn’t have the structure of a true knowledge management platform, so information is everywhere all at once. This type of information overload isn’t effective in getting the right messages to the right people at the right time. Workplace’s various chats, groups, and threads can also lead to fragmented communication and limited reach. Finally, Workplace doesn’t integrate deeply enough with other tools, creating a siloed and messy experience when users are trying to find pertinent work information. 

It may be time to consider trading one very specific point solution for a comprehensive solution.

Turning a loss into an opportunity

Change can be challenging, but where there is change there is also opportunity.  With the limited scope of what Workplace has provided, companies now have the potential to turn what is a siloed conversation tool into a comprehensive digital home solution that is more impactful for the business. 

Leaders in charge of finding a replacement for their Workplace should ask themselves what value the organization loses with the sunset of this tool, and consider in what ways a replacement could be an improvement to what Workplace offered. 

Platforms like Happeo provide a space for social connection like Workplace did, and a number of other valuable features to go beyond social comms and connect your organization’s knowledge, communications, and people. Features to expand the scope of your strategic communications include:

• Pages, allowing your teams to easily create and manage long-term knowledge content. 
• Channels to provide the opportunity for more specific, short-term communications. with threads, reactions, and custom emojis. 
• Intelligent search means your people aren’t searching for what they need. 
• People features like org charts help every user know who’s who and what they do. 
• Integrations with other tools bring more meaning to your digital home and provide a place to start the day.
• Google integration means no more post or article-based information. Your organization can use the content in Drive to form a true knowledge library.

Any organization that has point solutions to any of the above features has the opportunity to simplify their tech stack and reduce technical debt by consolidating various one-off tools into a comprehensive platform that provides a digital home for every user to start their day and provides content deeper than social chatter. It provides a place to turn information into actionable knowledge and drive organizational efficiency. 

If you are from an organization that is seeking a replacement for Workplace: