How Workplace From Facebook Helped Us Create and Nurture a Strong Company Culture (Even with Workers Spread Throughout the Country)

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the JMARK Business Innovation Technology Experience.

Todd Nielsen:

Todd Nielsen here and Kristin Dunn from JMARK. We’ll be having Thomas Douglas here in just a minute. This is the third part webinar that we’ve done. We’ve done lots of webinars, but this is the third part in a series that we’ve done around Workplace. Today we’re specifically talking about how Workplace has helped us at JMARK to create and nurture a strong company culture, especially in this time that we’ve been so distributed and everybody working from home, and you in front of your lockers and me in my house in Texas. We’ve been able to really nurture the culture during this time.

Todd Nielsen:

Why don’t we start off just by sharing some thoughts that we each have. From your standpoint, what have you seen in the company and, specifically, in individuals you work with? How has Workplace enhanced the culture aspect? Not so much the collaboration and communication, that’s all part of it, but more the culture.

Kristin Dunn:

Like you mentioned, it’s all kind of tied together, but trying to separate out the cultural piece with all of us working so distributed these days, I know it sounds really simple but sometimes the simple things that kind of help build and develop our culture. The group of people that I have consistently worked with, it’s something as simple as we have a chat group that we all consistently communicate in. People will pop in first thing in the morning in their day and just kind of say, “Good morning,” and “Hey,” or just give people kind of that heads-up on what they have planned out for the day. Or maybe even something they could use help on. But that’s part of our culture too, we all want to still collaborate as a team and work together and support each other the best that we can. And Workplace has definitely given us the platform to do that.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, last week I think it was, we all were involved in a conversation about, I think it was us, in a conversation about culture. And that is such a hard thing to explain. Tom, you said it pretty well when we were talking. How would you describe what culture is so that we can go into the conversation about how workplace has enhanced and nurtured our culture?

Thomas Douglas:

I don’t remember what I said now, but I’m happy to give it a run. I think fundamentally the culture is the set of values and the agreements that an organization has about how they’re going to behave and how they operate as a company. It facilitates productivity, it facilitates interaction, it facilitates good behavior and bad behavior. I think, really, from a fundamental perspective, it’s the culture that is the foundation of how we produce promises to our clients. If we say we’re going to do it, then we’re going to do it. And it’s our culture that helps to facilitate that because of our core values, because we hire based on those things.

Thomas Douglas:

And then as you complement that with Workplace and everything that it brings to the table, it’s how do we make sure that our team stays connected and that they stay aligned and that they provide clarity to the outcomes that we expect? It is that platform 100% that drives those things forward and gives us the ability to make sure no matter where we are in the country or in the world that we can drive that alignment.

Todd Nielsen:

I think what you said, that was awesome, I think what you said last week that was a little funny actually is you said that describing culture is sometimes like describing love.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah, that’s exactly what it was.

Todd Nielsen:

Different for everybody.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, it’s 100% accurate. When you ask a child what love is, they may quickly talk about getting hugged from their mom, but you ask a 40 year old, 50 year old man what love is and it’s a totally different story. I think culture is the same thing for sure. You can’t necessarily describe and it’s not always tangible, but you absolutely can feel it and you know that it’s there, and it’s a bond that exists inside of an organization.

Todd Nielsen:

I think that’s a great word, is bond, because you hear everybody talk about culture and it’s kind of a buzzword in the leadership world. It’s kind of used over and over again. When you break it down, it’s really kind of glue, the bond that holds everybody together and pushes them towards a common objective, a common vision. It’s through the tool that we have, a tool like Workplace, that we can not make that bond, but we can enhance the already existing bond, the culture that we have, to allow greater execution, greater collaboration, and move the initiatives forward. And like you said, get things done that we say we’re going to get done, fulfill our obligations.

Thomas Douglas:

Absolutely.

Kristin Dunn:

Go ahead, sorry.

Thomas Douglas:

I was just going to say, it’s not only alignment around that and the bond associated with it. I think it helps to drive the behaviors. Not only where are we going but how are we going to get there? How are we going to act? What is acceptable and not acceptable inside of our organization for how we’re going to march down the road? I think the companies that don’t define that clarity and have those components figured out, you bring someone in who’s not a culture fit and it becomes really challenging to identify why, but in our environment that’s not hard at all because we know how we’re going to get from here to there and the behaviors that are okay. And the platform, to your point, just adds to it. It’s fuel on the fire that makes that much more substantial in order to facilitate that march, if you will.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah, what I was going to say is there’s so many different applications in anybody’s environment anymore for collaboration and getting things done, but if you really think about Workplace as an engagement layer between all of those, that’s what it’s doing. It’s allowing for that engagement that helps drive that culture between all of the different tools that you’re using every day.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, that’s so true. I hadn’t thought about that in that having a multitude of applications, and this is a little bit getting into a different topic but it’s related to Workplace in that, having a multitude of applications just confuses people. It weakens that bond. When you have communication and collaboration happening through a multitude of applications, you have chaos and you have confusion and you don’t know where to find stuff, it’s harder to move things forward. And so in that essence, it’s pretty interesting that you can think of a communication and collaboration tool as something that could nurture the bond and nurture the culture.

Thomas Douglas:

And drive that engagement, absolutely. It drives clarity. Ti’s like we go here for this and because of the access that Facebook has of three billion interactions a day, they know how people want to engage with technology. And that’s what pulls people in, it’s an engaging platform both from a “I like to use it because I know how to use it and it’s intuitive, but it’s also engaging the culture within itself to drive that collaboration in alignment.

Todd Nielsen:

Okay, so pretty much anybody that follows anything about leadership out there has heard the term by Peter Drucker that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Thomas Douglas:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Todd Nielsen:

We talked about culture, culture, culture. How has the experience over the last couple months where we as a company have had to distribute ourselves and we’re starting to see a little bit of a return now but we’ve been disconnected for a while, how has Workplace allowed us to… I would venture to say that Workplace has allowed us to strengthen the bond versus weaken the bond while we’ve been disconnected.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. When people aren’t next to each other, you have to rely on a tool or a capability to drive the interaction. And because it was built from the ground up to be that glue that maintains a culture across the globe, it was very natural and easy for our organization. And the reason… I think that it’s easy to say that in many ways our organization, our culture is stronger, is because it’s forced everyone to collaborate in the same way rather than the people are in the office are collaborating face-to-face, the people in another office are collaborating face-to-face, and when we’re not in the same place we’re using that platform. Now, we don’t have a choice; we’re all using a platform all the time.

Thomas Douglas:

And it’s kind of like what we’ve seen on a global scale. Digital transformation has accelerated by two or three years and forced everybody to adopt Zoom and other mechanisms for forward engagement and alignment with their clients and peers. The same thing happened inside of our organization, and because we already had Workplace in place, it made the bond come that much stronger. And we know from the trends and what’s going on in the world that that shift to digital transformation is never going to go back. People are going to continue to use video in more ways that they never have. And the same is true at our organization. We’re going to see that engagement really high in Workplace. It constantly pulls the bond and that strength, that culture together more and more effectively.

Todd Nielsen:

The thing I like about Workplace and this aspect of building culture, is it’s so holistic in the sense that it can cover so many different aspects. So for example, it’s not just a platform for video, it’s a platform for expressing emotions, for expressing concerns, for expressing agreeing or disagreeing with things. And you do that in a visual manner just like Facebook. You like a post or you love a post or you hate a post or something. You respond with gifs or you respond with messages or whatnot. It really takes this idea of video a lot more… It makes it a lot more broad because it’s really holistic in the sense that it brings together everything from task lists, to to-do’s, to collaboration, to sharing files, to announcements, to motivation, to leadership. It just brings so much different connections.

Thomas Douglas:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s the one place that you can go to at any point in time, whether it’s the middle of the night or the middle of the day, and get a sense for what’s going on inside the organization. What our CRM team is working on, what the service teams are working on, what’s going on in projects, what client issues are going on that we need to make sure and be aware of, what’s going on on a financial aspect, what challenges are the executive team focused on in order to move the company more effectively? That’s all going on inside of Workplace. I would call it like the truth center of what’s going on because you have all those capabilities of interactions, you don’t just have to read, “Oh well I like this, I don’t like this. You can see instantly, it’s a thumbs up, it’s a thumbs down, it’s a smiley face, it’s a gif with somebody dancing. It’s really easy to understand exactly how people feel about the things that are being accomplished and moving forward.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, it’s almost instant feedback on communications, whereas if it were email, there’d be 5% that would respond and there’d be another 15% that would respond a couple days later, and there’d be another 20% that would respond in two weeks, and there’d be another 40% that just would not respond and they’d delete it.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah. And then half of those that would hit reply all and put the wrong things in the broad message, clutter up everybody’s inbox.

Thomas Douglas:

One of the things, on that note, that I love about it is you can consume it as you’re ready to. It’s not somebody imposing something on your inbox; you consume it when you need to. Our security group where we collaborate about all the changes that are happening in the industry around security, you get a notice that it’s there, you’re aware of it, but it’s not like right now. I can read that as I’m waiting for a meeting to start or if I’m sitting in a car riding with someone else and just thumbing through trying to catch up on the news. I’m consuming the information around the security changes or whatever it may be as we go. So, it really does facilitate the transition of information in a consumable and healthy way.

Todd Nielsen:

We’ve shared this before and I was trying to pull up the data here. I’m waiting for Michelle to pull it over here. We’ve had somewhere around 9,000 chats a day that happen within our company, which are essentially these interactions happening. And that is really straight removed from email. You have the interactions that are happening, and these interactions are the likes, the comments, the shares, the posts, replies to comments, all of these things. I think I looked at the number last week and it was a whopping, somewhere around 15,000 connections a day or something. Or maybe it was… I’ll have to wait and get the number, but it was this massive amount per day per individual in the sense of, there’s just so many people that are interacting with the platform and collaborating, and that has just been the, like we talked about, the glue that’s enhanced the culture of the company during this time.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, I think we have to be careful and not paint a picture that that’s what people are spending all of their time on throughout the day-

Todd Nielsen:

Of course.

Thomas Douglas:

Because of the massive amount of work getting done every single day. People are plowing forward. Because the platform is so simple we can have all of these interactions, these information collisions, these transfers of knowledge, and it’s still not slowing us down. We had one of our board members say recently who compares many service companies and is involved in a lot of different organizations, he said, “I am always blown away by how much work you guys get done,” from interaction to interaction that he has with us. He’s absolutely floored by it. And part of that is the speed at which we can move and consume information, digest information within the organization. So while we have these interactions, they’re fast, they’re easy, and you can move on and get the work of the day done.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah.

Todd Nielsen:

Go ahead, Kristin.

Kristin Dunn:

That’s a good way of explaining it. I talked to a client that’s actually looking at this platform right now. And the way they’re currently communicating with their employees is traditional ways of communication, which is like mass emails and newsletters. Think about the gap of time every time there’s… Even if it’s a weekly newsletter, that’s a whole week that goes by that people may be going down the wrong path for a whole week that could’ve been course corrected instantly through a platform like this. How much work gets lost? Even though there’s people working, they’re working the wrong direction because they didn’t have that consistent touch like this platform provides for the alignment, consistent alignment. And it doesn’t take a lot of time versus a newsletter that I may or may not consume because it’s going to take me 30 minutes to read through this newsletter.

Thomas Douglas:

Yep. You’re exactly right.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, it’s-

Thomas Douglas:

Sorry, Todd. If you compare that to the best practices in HR, you don’t wait until an annual review to provide somebody feedback or a quarterly review. You want to provide feedback on an ongoing basis. And the same is true inside the business where people are putting their energy, where they create value, where they help the clients most effectively. That changes hour by hour, and especially in our industry, and so we want to make sure that we’re getting that out there and it’s easy to digest.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, and then that’s really important. I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve shared this before in that Workplace has allowed me to consume information so much faster in other areas. For example, email. I get a lot less email but I still get a ton of email but it has allowed me to quickly scan my email and quickly see what’s important.

Todd Nielsen:

And the same thing with chats. Chats and things that go on in Workplace, there’s so much information that’s given that you don’t necessarily have to react on, you don’t have to necessarily respond on. I sent a chat a little bit ago to three people on an agreement that we’re working on and I wasn’t expecting a reply. It was just a FYI. Whereas if that was buried in email, it might not be seen until tomorrow with everything going on. I can’t even really explain it because it’s so weird to think that email has gone down but the amount of interactions has gone dramatically up. Not by the same proportion, and that change in interaction has been instrumental in moving things forward and getting things done.

Thomas Douglas:

Essentially what you’re describing is removing friction and adding velocity. And that’s exactly what happens. As you talk to the transfer of information or the distribution of information, we’ve removed friction and we’ve increased velocity so we’re twice as efficient in getting information from one group of people to another. And that’s exactly what we wanted to accomplish when we adopted it.

Todd Nielsen:

We were kind of talking at a high level here. How about we get down into some of the tactics? Obviously we’re on a video call here and we’re not sharing the screen, but what are the tops ways that you all have used Workplace to help enhance the culture of those you work with, the bond and those you work with?

Thomas Douglas:

I’m happy to go. Kristin, do you want to take a stab or do you want me to go first?

Kristin Dunn:

Go ahead, I’ll follow up.

Thomas Douglas:

I think the first and most effective way, I think it’s important to think about how work gets done in an organization. So you do work on an individual basis, you do work as a group or as a team, and then you do work as a division or a department. And when you’re leading a team or division or department, one of the most important things is to have vision into everything that’s going on to make sure that the team not only is aligned, but they’re working on the things that are most important.

Thomas Douglas:

As a part of this, especially when we’re not in the same building where you would traditionally maybe come together and have a daily stand-up or something like that, we do virtual daily stand-ups where we’re sharing that kind of information in a team environment. I quickly can absorb everything that’s going on with a particular team, make sure that the energy is focused in the right areas, and if somebody is stuck or has an impediment as it relates to something, then as a leader of a team I can quickly jump in and say, “I know how to solve that problem. Let me pull that impediment away from you so that you can keep accelerating down the road.”

Thomas Douglas:

So for me, leading the organization knowing as fast as we go, ti’s critical that I know that we’re always headed in the right directions with energy being placed in the areas that our clients need us to put it in most effectively. And it’s that alignment that I get to see by taking a peek into the different teams in the organization, that vision into the different areas, and seeing the responses. How quickly are we solving problems or removing those impediments for people talks and speaks a lot to the velocity at which we’re able to move for our clients and for the team themselves. One of my favorite aspects is being able to see quick, fast, and in a hurry.

Kristin Dunn:

At my level where I’m at as far as communicating internally, I need to be able to communicate really quickly with a lot of different people at JMARK. I am set within a team, but historically for me to accomplish my goals I need to be able to communicate with just about every other department in JMARK very quickly. So this does do that, that’s more on the work side. If it’s always just about work, which I understand culture, one piece of it we talked about is how we’re accomplishing things as a company, how we’re getting things done, but there’s that feeling side of it kind of too that we kind of talked about.

Kristin Dunn:

This platform, especially in the dispersed scenario that we’re working in today, still allows for that human connectivity too. Rather than me just blasting someone with an email, “I need x, y, z or FYI, blah, blah, blah,” this gives that human touch to it a little bit. And I know it sounds cheesy, but something as small as using emojis that shows just a little bit more than just context, it adds that additional layer of human to communications. It’s not just let me puke a bunch of information on you. Let’s work on this together. It’s more human. I know that sounds odd, but it does. It adds that feeling to it that email just doesn’t deliver.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, I don’t think it sounds odd at all. If you think about how we as a society interact today, some of my friends that I was in the Navy with, I still see posts on a daily basis from them on hundreds of miles away. And that is how our society, as a whole, now interacts. It doesn’t sound odd to me. It’s taking the consumerization of IT and the consumerization of socialization and it’s bringing it into the workplace. So you’re consuming and socializing with your peers the same way that you do with family and friends around the world.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah.

Thomas Douglas:

So to me, it enhances the experience substantially.

Kristin Dunn:

That’s a great thing, that it enhances it all the way from something as simple as an emoji to a gif, or maybe I want to start a video chat and talk to this person face-to-face, or maybe I just want to share something with the rest of the company. I can do that through a live video. This platform gives you so many different layers of that human touch that you just don’t get through a lot of the traditional methods.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, Kristin. You stole my strategy there. Being that I’m permanently remote and many hundreds of miles away from the office, what it’s done for me is exactly what you said. Because before Workplace, it was email, email or phone calls. And when you have massive numbers of emails and you can pretty much just communicate via email in a text format, sure you could go online and find a meme or probably enter some code in to add an emoji, but it piles in to a backlog that just sits there, and sits there, and sits there. Whereas what it’s allowed me to do being remote is it’s allowed me to connect to people on a much broader scale because I can say something and add a little smiley face or add an emoji and they understand my context instantly without me having to explain it or double think it.

Todd Nielsen:

It goes back to the old days of sending an email and a few minutes after going, wait a minute, should I have said that? Should I have changed that a little bit? Not being able to go back and do that, whereas with chat it’s instantaneous and you can type something out and enter some emoji or meme or just, “What I meant to say was…” and sometimes I’m going so fast that I’ll type something out and I’ll miss a few characters and my head’s going faster than my fingers. Then I see what I wrote I’m like, okay, slow down, this is what I meant. It just allows you to have this instantaneous layered communication method where people really understand you and they understand what you’re doing. To be quite honest, a lot of people before Workplace thought I was just a boring task master, and that’s not true.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah.

Kristin Dunn:

[inaudible 00:27:03].

Thomas Douglas:

It ties the human and the emotion piece to it, but I think the part that is what you’re essentially articulating is that you’re changing from a platform like email and text messages and these other platforms, and even a lot of the chat platforms that are out there, you’re taking these things that people actually feel like are a pain in the ass. They feel like they’re a slave to them, they’re laborious, and it’s like it’s this task that I have to go through and do in order to check the boxes. And you’re moving to a platform that’s engaging and fun and it’s helping you to get things done in a very positive way without it seeming like a negative task. What you’re describing is the impact of having a good platform that facilitates that, because you feel good, you’re happy, you’re driving those interactions and those collaboration points in a way that is fun and engaging rather than, oh my gosh I’ve got another 200 emails to get through before I can go to bed. And I know we’ve all been there.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, I remember back in the day, way before I was with JMARK when I had a Blackberry, if that dates me in any way. I remember it was in my pocket and it would vibrate and ding a certain ding, and my heart, my anxiety would just go up. Because it’s like, another email. And it’s ding, ding, ding. And it’s usually ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And it’s like more stuff I have to deal with. But now when you get a chat, you know it’s going to be over fairly quickly. It’s just like, oh okay a chat. Let me take care of it and get back on with my thing.

Todd Nielsen:

And like you said Kristin, there’s times when you’re chatting on something and you’re like okay, we need to move this to a different medium because this is getting into too many levels complicated. And you hit a button and bam, there they are just like we are now on a video call and you’re talking through the problem and you’re still within the same solution.

Thomas Douglas:

Or even, which is not uncommon, you hit that button and you’re in the car and you take an audio call through the platform. So one person’s in their office at their desk talking to their computer while I’m driving down the road listening on an ear piece. And it works just the same, it works very well. I’ve done that many times where I’ve got a chat, I transfer to the vehicle to hit the road for whatever reason and continue the conversation and just instantly switch the platform.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah, it’s very versatile. Depending on whatever your role is within your company, it’s versatile enough to accommodate all of the different ways that people need to function. If you’re someone who has to be mobile consistently, it can run on your phone. You can take calls, video calls, you can chat, you can check your feed just like you would on a normal Facebook platform. It’s nice, it’s pretty slick.

Kristin Dunn:

The other piece with our culture, I can’t say enough about how well this helps new people come into the organization and get a really good picture of what our culture is, much faster than they ever could through email or other methods. The ease that they have to go back and look at historical things too, not just here’s all the new stuff, but all of the things that have helped create the company and build that culture they have access to pretty easy.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. Go ahead, Todd.

Todd Nielsen:

I think we should talk about that, but you reminded me… What went through my mind, you reminded me something we talked about several weeks ago. And that was, we were talking about meeting customers where they are. What you said kind of twisted that a little bit in my mind to meeting employees where they are. What you said about mobile was so important because I can go to the doctor’s office, I can do whatever, and I can still be connected with the vital things that I have to do without having to scroll through a bunch of emails and respond in a manner that’s totally different than a quick chat and expected.

Todd Nielsen:

And there are times when, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but there are times when at 4:30 or 4:45 when I’ve had solid meetings all day long and I am dead tired, I will take my phone and go lay down on the floor and scroll through all my Workplace notifications, and scroll through my chats, and talk to people and answer them, and click the chat button, and do a video call real quick. I might be on the floor or something talking to Dex. We’ll talk through something. But I think it’s the idea of… I like that idea of meeting employees where they are just like meeting your customers where they are because energy levels flow, and there’s stress levels, and everything happens. The way that you can communicate with workplace and have it mobile, have it on your computer, just enhances that ability to meet people where they are. Go ahead.

Kristin Dunn:

We kind of hit on that too without directly saying it. Every company is always very, very top of mind about what their brand is in the market space, but you also have an internal brand and part of that is your culture. That’s really [crosstalk 00:33:07].

Thomas Douglas:

The faster you grow, the harder it is to maintain exactly what you want the culture to be. When people come in and they can see the historical dialogue of the organization, how they solve problems, how they communicated, the company meetings, the get-togethers, we call them rallies inside of our organization where we’re getting together and we’re celebrating people, and wins, and communicating logistics and challenges, and everything that happens in a business. We’re pushing this information into a single platform. People can go back and look at those archives and pull them forward to make sure that they know in what to expect moving forward. So it really does drive that interaction, meeting people where they are, and that mobile first mentality.

Thomas Douglas:

When I got to go out to Facebook and meet with the Workplace team and they were talking to me about their goals as an organization, it’s that mobile first mentality. They’re developing, they’re pushing mobility first to keep people connected no matter where they are, but yet respecting the HR requirements of different organizations, and verticals, and employment types, and engagement types all the way around. And so it’s got the flexibility to handle all of those diverse applications and still provide great value that people get engaged in and want to interact with.

Todd Nielsen:

I think that’s another thing that I hadn’t thought about. I can go on vacation or take a few days off. And when I have time, I can open up Workplace and listen on my phone to a rally that we had or listen to a stand-up that my team had while I’m driving or something. And it just keeps me connected, whereas before it’s, “Can I get a recording of the meeting?” And then you’re being bounced around to different people and trying to figure out who has a recording. I’s like, “Oh, I forgot to record it in the cloud, it’s on so and so’s computer,” and different things. It’s a lot of, like we’re talking about, meeting employees where they are.

Todd Nielsen:

I do want to talk about this idea of how easy it is to onboard people into Workplace because it’s so easy and comfortable, because I want to dispel the myth that Workplace is like Facebook. We’ve rolled this out and had that question and concern in that, oh we’re just rolling out internal Facebook in our organization. And that is not true in any way, shape, or form. So how would you describe the differences between Workplace and Facebook that allows people to be familiar with it so easily?

Thomas Douglas:

Great question, and I get those questions all the time. It’s important to delineate the two, not only just from the operational piece of it but also from security perspective of it. Information is stored, the Workplace team goes through the accreditations, the IEEE, the SOC 2, the SOC 3, the Data Center Management, all of those things. It’s a separate set of activities to manage and meet compliance requirements as it relates to the platform itself.

Thomas Douglas:

So, you’re exactly right. When it comes to interacting, the benefit of what Facebook brings to the table is to know how people want to engage with the platform; what their preferences are, how they want their thumb to be on the phone, how they want to consume, how easy it is to like and engage people. They’re bringing the best of breed to the table as it relates to that, and then they’re changing the interactions so that they’re filtering information based on the things that are relevant to you. And that centers around groups. So in organizations you get work done in teams, and in Workplace there are groups that are centered around teams.

Thomas Douglas:

The biggest challenge that oftentimes exists within an organization is when you take a piece of work and you hand it from one team to another. So from marketing to sales, from sales to service, from service to billing. And those interactions oftentimes have friction in them. So if you know you need to solve that, you can create a group that crosses teams and allow the larger organization or a portion of that larger group to interact and solve problems and move things forward.

Thomas Douglas:

So I would describe it mostly as, it’s not this public format where anybody who posts anything is something that you’re forced to consume. That’s absolutely not the case. You can follow or not follow people based on your preferences. So, the CEO, certain leaders in the organization, if you want to follow them or if you want to follow somebody who always posts fun jokes or something along those lines, those are your preferences. But more importantly to that is you’re filtering the information based on the groups that you interact, so the all-company group, the department, and your team, and maybe a cross-functional team. So it narrows into the things that are relevant. And Facebook’s algorithms are pretty phenomenal at making sure that what’s important gets surfaced to you so that you can interact with it appropriately.

Todd Nielsen:

Yeah, I’ll add to that. It’s strange that when you look at Workplace, it doesn’t look anything like Facebook, but everybody understands likes, and everybody understands loves and smiley faces and angry faces. And everybody understands sharing and everybody stands commenting. And that’s what makes it so easy, but what’s different with Facebook is it’s done in a controlled manner. We are the company can control what is and isn’t put into the system through policies and through moderators. You can have moderators in groups, there can be approval for different things, you can have different permissions for different types of groups in Workplace and for doing different things.

Todd Nielsen:

And so, it’s familiar in the sense of the look, what you click on and how you interact is easy for people to get quickly without much training. But it’s totally different in the distraction sense. I don’t see Workplace as a distraction in any way, shape, or form. I see it as something that augments my knowledge and augments the communications and my awareness of what’s going on. Whereas social media can often be considered a distraction, which is bad for business in essence.

Thomas Douglas:

Exactly.

Todd Nielsen:

But it could be.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, I think it circles back to what we were talking about earlier, how you can digest more information more quickly because of the format and the structure, so that you can speed up with no ads popping up at you and nothing like that. You do have that control around it so that you can make things happen and get them done as quickly as possible.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah, it is like snack-sized content rather than full meals where you may get an email this long, so that’s the similarity. I don’t want to say they’re completely different, but there are similarities in the way that the platform itself functions on the way you’re consuming the information. But it is an enterprise application, it is not the same thing as your social platform, which is more individualized, like this is my Facebook. This is a company Facebook where you do have an individual account, but it is tied to groups and teams rather than specific people.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges that we have to deal with as we’re having conversations with people for the first time is that security piece of it that you mentioned Todd and you alluded to Kristin. Because it’s got to operate as an enterprise application, which means you have to have controls, you have to have best practices, you have to have the expectations and the ability to deal with things that are in violation of those. And all of that is built into the platform so that you can control the messages. And whether it’s who you go through an approval process or you use an enterprise admin or an admin in the application to recognize that somebody posted something that doesn’t align with the acceptable use inside the company, you can take it down.

Kristin Dunn:

Yeah.

Todd Nielsen:

Right. As we think back to culture again, which is kind of the theme of our talk today or discussion, as JMARK and other companies are moving back into the office, how do you feel Workplace will continue to augment the culture of the organization when we are back to a mostly face-to-face type of operation?

Thomas Douglas:

I think it’s been long enough that people have developed good habits for sharing information in a way. It’s documented and it’s in there almost as a summary. I don’t expect that… You’ll see maybe some interactions go down, but in terms of the things that are getting done, the priorities, we are working very quickly as an organization in this environment and it’s because of the habits that we’ve developed, the things that we’ve sorted out and is a part of being apart. I think people like that velocity, so they’re going to carry that forward and continue to use it in that way. Now that I know this stuff, I don’t ever want to go back to the old stuff. That’s just not going to happen.

Todd Nielsen:

I think it’s allowed us to break certain behaviors. I heard somebody talking about how before all this happened with COVID, if they needed something they would get up and go knock on someone’s door, interrupt them, and have a conversation. Workplace has allowed them to kind of break that behavior and just quickly ding them, “Hey are you available to have a discussion right now?” Not be the interrupter. And I agree, I think that as we get back to the office environment, I think that a lot of behaviors have, for the better, potentially been broken to help increase our velocity and help us to continue to communicate and collaborate in a manner that allows us to move, adapt, and innovate at speeds that are fast.

Thomas Douglas:

I totally agree. It stopped this stuff. People poking in your office, “Hey, how you doing?” I hope that goes away and never comes back. [inaudible 00:44:30] “You got a second?”

Todd Nielsen:

I’ve been on video calls with you in the office and people have done that. And I’m sitting here going oh my gosh.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah. I do though, I think it’s formed a lot of good habits and using technology for what it’s capable of delivering in the most efficient way. That’s why it’s there. The foundation and purpose of tech is to do things better and more efficiently. We’ve learned some new skills and capabilities as a part of all this, which has been great.

Kristin Dunn:

I think you’re right in the fact that it’s been a long enough period of time for people to develop different habits than what they had before. But also a long enough period of time for people to realize that it’s okay to not necessarily have to have that face-to-face where I physically get up and walk down the hall. They can still get that similar feel from this platform without having to leave their desk necessarily to do that. And there’s that level of efficiency, because I know personally I’ve been in face-to-face conversations and been like, “Well, I don’t have that data that you’re asking me for right now at my fingertips because I’m not at my desk,” whereas I can still have that same type of communication with people and have that data readily at my fingertips because of the type of communication that we’re able to have through this platform.

Thomas Douglas:

Yeah. The other thing, on that note, is I think that it has made it a better… We have become a better company at remote people. One of the big challenges that we identified two years ago was that we needed to create an amazing remote experience, whether somebody was working out of the office, or was permanently out of the office, or if it was another office in Springfield, we had to do a better job of pulling people together. And this platform has forced and enabled us, I guess is the right word, to become a company without borders. It doesn’t matter.

Todd Nielsen:

Very true.

Kristin Dunn:

Staying consistent with the message that we’ve kind of talked about throughout this conversation, so the platform lets individuals meet where they are, but it also allows us to accommodate each other in that same sense.

Todd Nielsen:

Absolutely. And as we do that we’re increasing the bonds, we’re increasing the connections, we’re increasing the relationship, there’s greater clarity in the organization, there’s greater velocity to move things forward. Essentially in the end it’s a great platform. It’s a platform that [inaudible 00:47:28] not, from a cost perspective, something that can change your culture so rapidly and so quickly, it is probably one of the cheapest things you could do. It’s just an amazing opportunity to enhance a culture of any organization.

Todd Nielsen:

So if anybody is interested, feel free to reach out to us at jmark.com or you can chat with you on our Facebook page. Kristin will follow up with you and start the conversation. Until next time, take care.

Thomas Douglas:

Thanks everybody.

Kristin Dunn:

See ya.

Thomas Douglas:

Have a great day.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for attending this podcast. We hope it has been informative and helped convey that at JMARK we are people first and technology second. To learn more and discover additional content relevant to your business, please visit us online at jmark.com or at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You may also call us at 844-44-JMARK. Thank you for your time and we look forward to seeing you again.