BT employees’ adoption of Workplace from Facebook has exceeded the expectations of its internal communications teams, with over 70% of employees actively using the platform to date.

Speaking to UC Today, BT’s Director of Internal Communications, Helen Willetts, and Internal Communications Director, Anna Epps, said that, although accelerated by the coronavirus lockdown, the roll out of Workplace as an informal and authentic source in internal company communications has been widely accepted.

“When we looked at our channels, we felt we were missing a more social platform” said Epps, “By this we mean a mobile first channel, and one that is two way with the people across the organisation”

“We do a communications channel audit every two or three years and what we found is that there were quite a few channels dedicated to one or more business units but there weren’t that many channels that spanned right across BT.

So our options were to pick some of those channels currently in use and take them across the group, or look at the gaps in our channel capability and go from there.

Workplace is mobile-first, user friendly, but more importantly, we thought it would support the culture that we wanted to create at BT. It’s fast paced, authentic, provides those connections, and helps colleagues interact with each other instead of just providing blanket communication out across the group.”

BT have been using Workplace as an internal social channel alongside Teams as a productivity channel since July last year. Both Willetts and Epps said that the idea of using Teams for informal communications wasn’t something they entertained.

“It never really occurred to us to use Teams as a social channel because we use it in a really different way and the two complement each other” said Willetts. “I think the whole organisation, bolstered by lockdown has got used to what we want to use each platform for and I don’t think there is much overlap or confusion.”

“We’re also very careful in terms of the different features that we turn on for both Teams and Workplace” added Epps, “a few years ago, it was a lot more clean cut what an internal comms panel was and what a collaboration platform was.

Now with all the new features each platform offers there is a blurring between what each platform is used for. We’re really careful to make sure that we understand the core purpose of each channel, and then we make conscious choices  to turn on or off each of the features available.

Because we have both Teams and Workplace, we are really clear about the core purpose for each platform. Teams is the place that people collaborate, it’s where documents are stored and it’s where people go to do work, whereas Workplace is for conversations with other employees, sharing ideas, innovations, best practices, and building connections.”

 

 



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