Revealed: the ROI of Workplace by Facebook

This week Facebook released a detailed study into the value their enterprise product, Workplace, delivers for those organisations who have rolled it out.

Conducted by heavyweight research firm Forrester, it uses a combination of surveys and qualitative interviews with customers to quantify the difference Workplace can make in enterprise collaboration and communication.

The headlines are impressive. Among the quantified benefits seen by customers are:

• 10% increase in revenue per customer
• 20% reduction in time to make decisions
• 10% higher employee retention
• 34% reduction in time for frontline employees to receive company news

Organisations reported those harder-to-quantify benefits too – improved employee engagement and satisfaction, increased leadership visibility, efficiency gains and reductions in the use of shadow IT, and many others.

This report goes on to provide a detailed analysis of costs versus benefits, concluding that customers begin to see payback on investment in three months.

It gives detailed, costed examples of how the platform can be used to improve productivity and worker efficiency, and drive down operational expenditure.

Caveats apply; the report was commissioned – and paid for – by Facebook, and a disclaimer at the beginning notes it’s not designed for use as a competitive analysis. Remember, participant organisations are not representative: those chosen to be interviewed are by definition their most successful customers – those who have invested the most money in rollout, and who have the greatest organisational buy-in. These results may not be easily replicated by others who don’t have these critical success factors in place.

But it marks a significant milestone in the maturity of Workplace and the team behind it. We Intranetizens have criticised the Workplace team in the past for a degree of naivety about the buying path for enterprise social tools, particularly in larger corporates. Early marketing made broad-brush pronouncements about connecting employees and replacing intranets, without any real rigour to back that up. None of which was much use to internal communications teams looking to get approval to pilot or launch Workplace in their own organisations.

Taglines like “together changes everything” don’t cut much ice with Financial Directors. IC managers need quantifiable business benefits to build support for major overhauls of their communications structures and tools.

And this report provides them in spades. This could be solid gold for anyone trying to build a business case for a Workplace programme. It’s worthwhile reading, too, for those who have already rolled it out but are struggling to get budget or build management support to do more with it. For example it could prove highly valuable to show leadership teams the benefits of more actively participating, or for investing in development of bots.

It’s useful to have dollar quantified value placed against features that we all recognised to be valuable without previously being able to calculate the value. Notwithstanding the obvious challenge around the funding of this report, it’s a compelling sales story for Workplace but also, in all likelihood, any workplace technology that provides similar features. Boards will really appreciate the switch from soft to hard value statement.

The ‘Total Economic Impact of Workplace by Facebook’ report is available here.