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by Aware
With the May 2024 announcement that Meta is shutting down Workplace, their enterprise collaboration and employee experience platform, many organizations that rely on the platform are left wondering where to go next and what happens to all the data contained on Workplace.
Meta’s reasoning for the closure is a shift toward AI and metaverse technologies, which it believes will transform the way people work in the future. Meta has also been cutting costs and streamlining products for a few years in an intensely competitive enterprise communication tool market. This pivot is intended to give Meta a chance to focus on emerging fields.
As for where organizations should go next, Meta recommends their preferred migration partner: Workvivo. Zoom acquired Workvivo in April 2023, and the platform is a close cousin of Workplace in user experience. With clients like Amazon, Dollar General, Ryanair, and Virgin, Workvivo is no stranger to large corporate clients with a global workforce.
Contents
- What is Workvivo?
- Are there challenges to using Workvivo?
- How to choose the best alternative to Meta Workplace
- How to create a transition plan away from Workplace
- How to migrate from Workplace to Workvivo
- Consolidate and empower your digital workplace with Aware
What is Workvivo?
Similar to Workplace, Workvivo is a business comms and employee engagement platform companies can rely on for internal collaboration, intranet activities sharing, peer recognition, and cultural alignment. Its intent is employee engagement and resource sharing in an all-in-one communications platform.
Key features of Workvivo include:
- Activity feed: A social media-like activity feed where employees can see and post updates, share content such as images, documents, and videos, and communicate through reactions, comments, and reposts.
- Employee recognition: A space for recognizing peers through awards, badges, and shout-outs that celebrate the accomplishments of teams and individuals.
- Collaboration space: Dedicated locations for teams to collaborate and share updates on projects, post notifications, and ask questions.
- Integrations: Integrations with other collaboration tools like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and more, for centralized access to apps and stored content.
- Analytics and reporting: Insights into employee engagement, sentiment, and patterns of use through data and analytics on active users, posts, likes, and comments.
- Employee surveys and polls: Captures employee feedback through quick polls and surveys.
- Knowledge base and document storage: A central repository for company information, onboarding tools, policies, procedures, and documents.
- People directory and org chart: Helps employees follow company structure and connect with colleagues.
Meta recommends Workvivo as a close replacement for Workplace due to Workvivo’s similarity in end user experience. Ideally, Meta customers migrating from Workplace to Workvivo should experience minimal employee engagement decrease as a result of the transition.
Whitepaper: How to harness your organization's collaboration and sentiment data
Are there challenges to using Workvivo?
One of the initial challenges to using Workvivo, or any Workplace alternative, is that there is no migration tool available to help with the data transfer process. Workvivo also does not have AI automations at the moment. These two items are, Workvivo says, on its 2024 roadmap but companies considering Workvivo should take these limitations into consideration.
Based on reviews, users have also found the following challenges with Workvivo:
- Limited reporting and analytics: Some reviews have mentioned limited reporting and analytics capabilities in Workvivo, like only seeing the total number of views on posts. Others have reported that the backend and administrative areas of the platform could be improved.
- Usability challenges: The user experience has tripped some reviewers, particularly in the setup phase. One admin experienced difficulties with onboarding new users and personalizing notifications settings, while another had trouble sharing documents.
- Mobile app issues: Seamlessly switching between the mobile app and web versions of Workvivo can be challenging, which creates barriers to employee engagement. More than one reviewer experienced this concern.
- Cost: The expense of the platform is also a consideration. One reviewer found that the plan pricing could prevent small businesses from adopting Workvivo as their platform of choice. Additionally, the chat feature, a tool many businesses consider a basic need for effective communication between colleagues and teams, is only available as an add-on feature.
Despite these challenges, overall reviews from those who use Workvivo are positive.
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How to choose the best alternative to Meta Workplace
While Meta recommends Workvivo as its migration partner, there are alternative employee experience and communications tools available. While assessing your potential Workplace alternatives, there are a few key considerations to keep in mind.
Assess your current employee engagement and data requirements
Is your current employee engagement platform working for your organization? This is an important question, because if your employees are performing a lot of workarounds due to internal communications concerns, perhaps a whole new way of collaborating is in order. If employee adoption of Workplace is low, Workvivo might not be the right alternative for your business.
You may also find not all of your employee engagement data needs to migrate. Happy birthday messages matter less than onboarding documents or project management conversation history. Save the data storage and only keep what’s necessary.
Speak to stakeholders about their requirements
Talk to your legal, information security, and compliance teams about what kinds of data security requirements and file retention needs they have. Make sure the alternative platforms you consider can satisfy regulatory agencies like the FTC and PCI-SSC, and comply with HIPAA and GDPR where relevant.
Evaluate alternatives to align with your organization’s goals and workflows
When considering your options, choose the platform that best fits how your company conducts business and collaborates. If you’re mostly a video conferencing organization that shares screens, then switching to a platform that’s instant messaging focused won’t do. Consider how you work and go from there.
Assess the user experience and reviews
For employees to engage with the new platform, the end user experience is of paramount importance. Consider the similarities and differences between your existing and new platform, what kind of learning curve is required to use the tool, and how the company will support employees, and encourage them to make the switch.
Consider the product’s customizability
No two companies are alike, and no two products will match perfectly. The ability to customize a platform to your organization’s specifications can be a deciding factor in choosing the solution that’s right for you.
Discover how you can unlock valuable insights from digital conversation data.
How to create a transition plan away from Workplace
After choosing a product, it’s time to move your workforce to the next platform. Transitioning hundreds or thousands of employees from one platform to another requires coordination and careful planning. Planning the move before Meta’s deadline ensures that the transition happens in a controlled way.
Once you’ve evaluated the alternatives to Workplace and backed up any data you want to retain, follow these steps to building a migration plan.
Create a transition timeline
Connect with stakeholders across the business to determine the timeline necessary for the move. For example, schedule the migration around major events planned by employee experience or comms teams, and ensure that legal, security, and compliance teams have enough time to vet and approve any vendors that may be necessary to secure the data in the new platform.
Communicate with employees
Communicating with your employees how the migration will happen is a key part of your transition to another platform. Outline the steps for each group of employees, know how you’ll communicate with them while they’re migrating, and how you’ll enforce the steps of the move. Be sure to leave yourself time to troubleshoot any bumps that may happen.
Trial a smaller move
For larger organizations, it makes sense to trial the migration with a controlled group of employees before trying to onboard hundreds or thousands of people at once. Use control groups to uncover sticking points with the move such as difficulty creating accounts or navigating the new tool.
Plan your migration and cut-off dates
Have a date in mind for the migration, but be prepared for unexpected delays in the process, especially if you’re migrating a large number of employees. Build a transition period into your plan where employees can still access both platforms before the final cut-off date.
Allow for follow-up feedback
Once the transition is complete, check in with your employees for whether they’ve gotten everything they needed so you know nothing has been left behind. If there are any gaps in the migration, and you’ve left yourself room before Workplace has shut down, you can retrieve any vital information or create a new workflow in the current platform to account for and close the gaps.
Follow these tips to create a more human-centered organization.
How to migrate from Workplace to Workvivo
Meta and Zoom are working together to make the transition between platforms as seamless as possible. Meta has already announced that their data downloads will be delivered in a metadata format that is compatible with Workvivo for easier migration. However, there is currently no migration tool available that will complete the move for businesses, and there are some UX differences between Workplace and Workvivo that will need to be communicated to employees as they onboard.
Migrating between Workplace and Workvivo may be the simplest solution for companies that want similar functionality and enjoy high Workplace adoption, but the above steps should still be considered as the move must be completed manually.
Unlock human signals from your collaboration tools. Learn more now.
Consolidate and empower your digital workplace with Aware
If the idea of transitioning to a new collaboration platform without the help of a migration tool leaves you cold, Aware can help!
Aware brings multiple employee-centric features and functions together under one roof to assist organizations with their data preservation and migration to new platforms:
- Data is always secure. Once it’s encrypted, it’s stored in a defensible archive accessible only to the client and never shared with third parties.
- Aware’s AI-powered and machine-learning models ingest and capture sentiment, insights, and patterns from your digital workspace with near-human accuracy.
- A centralized approach allows you to unify your data with one-click native integrations with most digital workplace apps. Aware is an approved partner of Meta, Zoom, Workvivo, Slack, Microsoft, and more. Aware can support a migration from Workplace to any of these platforms.
- Industry-leading NLP uncovers signals from across dozens of collaboration tools to collect valuable insights about your business and brand.
- Integrate with survey apps and enable quick data analysis—in minutes, not hours. Upload survey data and leverage automated summaries to save manual review and get accurate analysis by the industry’s leading behavioral machine learning models.
- Get secure data governance and granular role-based access control settings to preserve employee privacy with anonymized results.
Surveys aren’t always enough, as one pharmaceutical company discovered when their leadership wanted to better understand employee sentiment and engagement. Annual surveys are high-cost, high-time commitment, and the answers are often skewed. They wanted a better employee sentiment calculation, more frequently.
Using Aware, the company now gets a better pulse of their employee’s emotional barometer across the organization in real-time with trending topics and associated context. With better communication and monthly culture reports with senior leadership, they boosted employee satisfaction and overall company culture.
When big changes happen, like migrating from a major collaboration tool such as Workplace, having Aware’s data protection, employee sentiment analysis features, and implementation services at your fingertips can make all the difference for a smooth transition.
Contact us today to help with your data migration needs from Meta Workplace.
Request a demo to learn how Aware can support your Meta Workplace migration.
