As you’ve seen, I’m big on culture. The best way to create a dynamic and successful organizational culture is to encourage free collaboration among employees. To date there have been a number of tools that have attempted this (email, Lync, Slack, etc) but none have really caught on.
Facebook is introducing their Facebook@Work program that could change the dynamics.
Let’s start by saying I’m not naturally inclined to be a Facebook fan. I do have an account but I am friends with less than 100 people on it. It’s something I use simply to follow true friends and family. I rarely post to it because being that public with my private life has always felt a bit weird for me.
But taking the base Facebook functionality and applying it to the work world (with a solid and unmovable wall between work and personal hopefully) could change the dynamics. One of the things I most desire working from home is a way of communicating passively (not through email or phone) with coworkers. Facebook is the perfect platform for this.
A community site for the business could be a huge boost to creativity as well. It would be an easy place for casual and on-going brainstorming as well as a great way to meet people similar to yourself/your function across the firm. Internal networking is as important as external networking.
Will it work? I don’t know. Facebook hasn’t given me much reason to trust them with data historically and I could see them trying to cross the work and personal sides at some point which would be a deal breaker for me. But at the very least they will draw a ton of attention to the space and hopefully advance it forward quite a bit.