With Meta Workplace shutting down, it's time to upgrade your communications

News broke recently that Meta would be discontinuing Workplace, the decade-old enterprise communications platform built on a version of Facebook. The platform will work until September 2025 and remain read-only until May 2026. 

In their statement, Meta announced that it would be focusing on “building AI and metaverse technologies” that they believe “will fundamentally reshape the way we work.” 

Though there is over a year until Workplace is no longer usable, sadly the disruption for many companies has already begun. The news left thousands of companies scrambling to find a long-term solution to the critical challenge of frontline communications for 7 million workers. Frontline workers already have difficult jobs and high turnover rates; frontline managers, HR leaders, and Communications teams should be gearing up to solve this challenge sooner, rather than later, and working to minimize the impact on frontline workers.

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Undoubtedly, the question on many people’s minds right now is: what’s next for employee communications? Our CEO, Sean Nolan, shared his thoughts on the future of digital employee experience after Meta’s announcement, including his empathy for affected workers and his optimism that leaders will take the opportunity to upgrade to a modern employee app that will “make the experience of being employed a simple and fulfilling one.”

If you’re one of the many people frustrated with Meta forcing you to make such a big, unexpected change this year, we hope you’ll also be excited  to explore how employee communications technology has developed beyond Workplace’s platform. You can start by checking out some alternatives to Workvivo and a side-by-side comparison of Blink and Workvivo.

Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve evaluated your options and you’d like to hear how other companies are approaching their employee communications’ needs. In one of those weird, cosmic coincidences, Meta’s announcement happened at the same time that we hosted a webinar with our customer, Dee Set, who shared how they evaluated  their employees’ needs by comparing email, Workplace, and Blink as the long-term communications solution.

You can watch the webinar, Beyond email: how turning off employee email can transform the employee experience, here. Or, keep reading for the highlights of the story from Dee Set’s Joseph Peers, Head of Activity Planning & Data, and Quinton Hayter, Group Information Security Officer. 

Why email wasn’t working for Dee Set

Dee Set is one of the UK’s leading retail suppliers. In 2019, Dee Set recognized that they were spending a lot of money on email without much to show for it. 

Email was especially challenging as the primary communication tool for frontline workers. Some of the challenges included:

• Communication was transactional and one-way
• It was hard to build engagement and culture through email
• The tech infrastructure to support it was complex
• Little insight into the impact of emails
• Analog channels like word of mouth and digital signage did a lot of heavy lifting

Email was so ineffectual that they made the decision to cut off support for email within 3 weeks—without having the next solution nailed down even. (Spoiler alert: they chose and deployed Blink in that time.)

What they learned during the Workplace trial

One solution Peers and Hayter helped evaluate for Dee Set was Meta’s Workplace. Right away, they ran into issues getting all of the company onto the social platform. As they dug deeper, the lack of two-way communications was surprisingly lacking, considering how vital it is to engaging on Facebook. The final straw was that Workplace required a workplace email—which would be a huge step backward in their effort to improve communications and cut down on wasteful spending on underutilized email accounts.

While their limited pilot of Workplace didn’t work out long term, the experience did surface some key insights that would help them make their ultimate choice. In particular, Dee Set liked the idea of a “digital front door” that provided a single place for everyone to communicate and find everything they needed. They also realized that they wanted a solution that was ready out of the box and simple for even the least-tech savvy worker to use on their own phone.

Even though Workplace provided more value than email as a frontline communications solution, Dee Set wanted to deliver an even better experience for their remote workforce.

Maximizing—and simplifying—the tech infrastructure for frontline workers

As the Group Information Security Officer, Hayter recognized the challenge that a complicated tech infrastructure presented to frontline workers. Their frontline workers weren’t just relying on their personal smartphones and email as the main communication channel—they had to manage logins for HR systems, timesheets, learning platforms, and communication tools to retrieve documents. It was complex, costly, and frustrating for frontline workers and the IT team.

Blink’s “digital front door” approach transformed this process thanks to deep integrations with so many systems. By giving access to HR, payroll, and other systems directly within Blink, Dee Set was able to maximize the usage of their tech infrastructure among frontline workers. 

What happened when Dee Set started with Blink

After a rapid deployment while email was being shut down, Dee Set’s frontline employees quickly took to the Blink app. In fact, according to Peers, they were a victim of their own success in those initial months. 

There were large employee chat groups and lots of content being shared in the News Feed—while the engagement was exciting and new, Dee Set’s leaders had to educate people on communication best practices to improve the experience. They also used the flexibility of Blink to create refined groups and roles, which made it easier to target communications.

After those initial hiccups, Dee Set has continued to make Blink into the best solution for their unique workforce. As a result, they’ve seen a huge rise in engagement in frontline workers. 

• 91% of users are active every month
• 72% of users respond to surveys
• 152k chat messages
• 1.3k feed posts

With more engaged frontline workers, new hire turnover has gone down, productivity has gone up, and helped create a community amongst the remote workforce thanks to secure chat groups.  

There’s so much more to hear from Peers and Hayter we haven’t covered here. For the full story, be sure to check out the webinar and hear more about how Blink helped them navigate the challenges of the pandemic, how they rolled out the platform so fast, how they created a better onboarding experience for new starters, and more frontline communications and IT best practices they’ve adopted with Blink.

‍Learn more about Blink for your frontline communications

Whether you’re looking to move away from email or exploring alternatives to Workplace and Workvivo for frontline communications, it’s a great time to check out Blink’s employee super app.

If you want to see what a mobile-first, all-in-one solution can do for your organization, book a demo to chat with an expert today.

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